Ultrawides rub the viewer's nose in your subject. Properly used, ultrawides grab your viewer and yank him into the middle of your situation.
Ultrawide lenses are for getting close and bringing the viewer into the photo, not for fitting a subject into a photo.
Ultrawides are not for the faint of heart. For newsmen, ultrawides are for jamming into the face of an enraged wino brandishing a feces-covered broken bottle to exaggerate his crazed anger and crude weapon.
Most people use ultrawides too sheepishly, and get crummy results with tiny subjects dwarfed in the middle of an open frame. When I use my 14mm I constantly have to force myself to get closer and pay rapt attention to the sides of my viewfinder, which are too often blank or loaded with junk.
Ultrawides require you to get very close and personal to anything you are shooting. Even a fraction of an inch (or cm) will make a huge difference in your composition, so you need to be very deliberate with your movement.
If you use them properly, you'll be rewarded with dynamic images. I've discovered that regardless of how many lenses I use, and however many photos I make on a trip, the ones I ultimately love the most are always the ones made with the widest lens I brought.
How Wide is Wide
All this becomes more important as your ultrawide gets wider. For 24mm lenses, you can ignore all of this. For 20mm lenses you ought to pay at least a little attention. For 17mm lenses you'll need most of this, and with 14mm lenses you need to know all this, otherwise the only good photos you'll probably get will be from dumb luck.
Everything here applies to all lenses, however normal and tele lenses don't exhibit the crazy properties I'll be describing. The wider you get, the crazier things become and the more attentive you need to be.
28mm and 24mm lenses are still pretty normal as wide lenses go. If 24mm (16mm on DX and 1.6x) is your widest lens, you won't see or need much of what I'll discuss here.
When you get to 20mm lenses (12mm on DX and 1.6x), things start to get a little weird. At 18mm and 17mm things are getting very weird, and by 15mm, 14mm and 13mm things are totally out of control. This is why some of us love ultrawide lenses, however you have to understand and be able to make productive use of the weirdnesses of ultrawide lenses. You have to shoot full-frame or FX to get the equivalent of 14mm; there are no lenses that wide for the little formats.
Getting it all in
Most beginners, myself included for 15 years, think wide-angle lenses are for "getting it all in."
They think that the wider the lens (or stitched panorama), the more encompassing, impressive, huge and all-enveloping will be the result.
I don't have any really bad examples of "getting it all in" shots, so this one, made in good light, will have to suffice.
Beginners know that wider lenses get more in, and so the pictures must be better. They know that 14mm lenses are expensive because pro organizations like ASMP mandate camera companies to charge more so that only pros can afford them and get the "good pictures."
As a kid, I first got a 35mm wide angle, than a 25mm Lentar wide-angle, then a 24mm Minolta Rokkor-X wide angle, a 17mm Tokina in 1984 and then my ultimate, the 15mm Nikkor back in 1992.
Oddly, my pictures sucked.
Why is that?
All that most people get with ultrawide lenses are parking lots in the bottom half of their image, and nothing anywhere except for the center. Worse, ultra-wides see all the distracting junk on the side of your subject and weaken the shot.
The shot above is made in the middle of the Mojave Desert, so there isn't anything on the sides. I got lucky.
The Easy Way
The best photos most users get with ultrawides are made inside large spaces, like Grand Central Station or stately homes. These highly-detailed spaces usually make for fun photos regardless of where you put or point the camera.
Scale
Painters understand scale, but few photographers do.
Scale means paying attention to the size at which an image will be printed as you're creating it.
Images have entirely different meanings when printed at different sizes.
A photo of a mouse printed at 4x6" (10x15cm) is normal. The same photo printed at 20x30" (50x75cm) is kind of weird. Why would someone make a print of a tiny mouse so big?
The reason photos of the Grand Canyon usually lack the "you are there" feeling is because they are only printed a few feet wide at most. A 40x60" (1x1.5m) print is a big print, but still doesn't do the Grand Canyon justice. Show the Grand Canyon as an IMAX movie as shot from a moving helicopter, and the audience feels it.
Panoramic stitching is making things worse today because anyone, even with most Canon point-and-shoots which come with free software, can make an image with nothing in it. In the old days, you had to buy a $2,000 lens. Let's face it: when you print that panorama at the same size as a normal image, doesn't it seem to lack the "you are there" feeling you used to get before easy panoramas?
Big things need to be printed bigger. If you want to "get it all in," you'd better be prepared to print huge. If you aren't going to print huge, the only thing an exotic wide lens or panorama does is make the things in your picture too darn small.
Even if you print 20 feet (6m) tall with ultrawide shots, you're still a long way away from making good images. Scale is only one of many basic elements of creating an image.
Composition: Impact in Normal-Sized Images
What makes a great image doesn't change with what lens you use.
What changes with an ultra-wide lens is how much more difficult it is to get your subject framed the way you want it.
Most people would be perfectly happy with this shot, but look at the sides. Nothing. This shot really only has anything going on in the central square portion of the frame. I wasn't close enough. I walked into this place, said "wow," and popped off a few without thinking.
I put the bottom of a column in the lower right, but I didn't get it to the bottom of my frame. I wasted the bottom inch on the right, and the entire left side is almost all devoid of anything meaningful.
Who are the people in the lower left? Just like everything in life, if something isn't adding to the composition, it's taking away.
The water thing was only 10 feet away, but it may as well have been a mile. Print this shot 20 feet tall and it will be impressive, but how can we make it stronger in the sizes we really use?Get Close!
The hardest part with ultra-wides is getting close enough.
You can never get too close!
You have to push yourself to get and stay close enough.
Not that this is a great shot, since the elements on each side are each fighting to pull your eyes out of the frame in opposite directions, but these snaps show how I have to approach every scene with an ultrawide.
Watch your edges and make sure your subject fills the frame. I'm always amazed at just how much wasted space happens at the edge of my images unless I work at paying attention to the sides of my finder with a 14mm lens.
If I get lazy, all I get is a smaller subject in the middle with loads of space between it and the frame edges. I wind up cropping, which just eliminated the whole point of using an ultrawide lens.
With longer lenses, the direction in which you point the camera is the most critical element. With ultrawides, camera position is more critical. Even a fraction of an inch makes a huge difference in composition.
I'm very serious: as I hand-hold my camera inches away from something, my breathing changes my composition. I have to be careful and shoot at just the right time.
In the shot above, I'm only inches away from the naked lady.
Forget tripods, unless you're using a macro positioning rail. Those rails only adjust in two directions, not all three, so you'll need a tripod with a geared-rise. Position has to be within fractions of an inch. I can't place a tripod that precisely. Ultrawides aren't like wide, normal and tele lenses where an inch or two makes no difference. Used up close, a half-inch can make or break a photo with an ultra-ultra wide.
Watch your edges
I don't look at the center of my image when composing. I have to keep looking at the edges to make sure things are close enough.
When fine-tuning balance, I look away and compose out of the corner of my eye. It sounds silly, but this is important in abstracting your composition away from reality so you can see the basic structure of the image and make it strong.
Ultrawide shots are all about lines.
Personally, if there are lines to be had, I seem to like having one leading in from the lower left corner. I prefer to have the lines enter from the corner itself, not one of the sides.
This is just me. Even I'm surprised at how I consistently see the world this way.
Painting is an art of inclusion, meaning that something only gets into the painting if the painter paints it that way. You can always tell a sloppy painter who's done watercolors from a photo because of all the needless junk. If you see telephone poles, crooked horizons and cars stopped in the middle of the street, it's obvious a painting was made from a snapshot.
Photography is an art of exclusion, meaning that everything gets into your photo unless you go out of your way to exclude it. You must always watch for distractions. This takes experience, since by human nature we don't see these distractions until we get our pictures back.
Most people point a camera directly at a subject and shoot. It takes training to look all over to ensure an image only includes what contributes to making it stronger.
Ultrawides get everything in, whether we want them to or not. This is another reason they are so difficult to use well. Unlike more reasonable lenses, ultrawides have such huge depths-of-field that everything is in focus, even the unwanted junk up and down, left and right.
When shooting ultrawide, watch your corners to fill the frame with what you want, and be sure that there isn't any distracting junk.
Long lenses compress perspective: they seem to squeeze everything into looking like it's in the same plane.
Ultrawides do the opposite: they expand the apparent depth of an image. Shots made with ultrawides push back the background, and since you have to get close, pull near objects even closer.
Ultrawide lenses exaggerate the difference between near and far. This is one of the main reasons we love them!
Expanding Space
Exaggerating depth means that exteriors and interiors seem more spacious. A normal lens will just show a section of one wall of a room, while an ultrawide can show two, and often three, walls at once.
The ultra-wide shot pushes the back wall back and makes a room look many times deeper than it is.
An ultrawide will make a small back yard seem like a park.
This effect is so powerful that you have to be careful. When I posted an online ad to rent out my old condo, I had people calling from all over the USA thinking it was such a deal because it looked cavernous. I had to explain this effect to them, but they didn't believe me and I people were calling from as far away as Pittsburgh trying to leave deposits, sight unseen.
If you shoot real estate listings for a living, an ultrawide lens pays for itself fast.
Sucked-out Corners
The corners of ultra-wide shots look as if someone printed the image on a rubber sheet and pulled-out the sides and corners. If photographing people, beware that they'll look fat on the sides if standing (like the example of me below), or skinny if they're lying down, since the sucking stretches things towards the edges and especially the corners.
Alignment
Ultrawides exaggerate any misalignment between film plane and subject plane. Use this to your advantage.
This snap looks pretty crazy, but the camera was pointed down only slightly. Even this slight tilt has forced all the lines to converge in crazy ways. If the camera is level, the results are boring:
Polarizing Filters
Don't do it!
The sky changes its polarization as you look from left to right. The sky has its largest amount of polarization, and thus polarizing filters have their greatest effect, at 90 degree angles from the sun.
Used on normal and tele lenses, POL filters have more or less effect depending on where you point them.
Used on lenses that can see a broad expanses of sky, a POL will render the more polarized areas much darker than the other areas. This causes nasty dark bands in the sky, and is why I never use a polarizer with an ultrawide lens.
Polarizing Filters
Don't do it!
The sky changes its polarization as you look from left to right. The sky has its largest amount of polarization, and thus polarizing filters have their greatest effect, at 90 degree angles from the sun.
Used on normal and tele lenses, POL filters have more or less effect depending on where you point them.
Used on lenses that can see a broad expanses of sky, a POL will render the more polarized areas much darker than the other areas. This causes nasty dark bands in the sky, and is why I never use a polarizer with an ultrawide lens.
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