Skip to main content

Wide Angle Lenses

Lesson 21 from: Fundamentals of Photography 2016

John Greengo

Wide Angle Lenses

Lesson 21 from: Fundamentals of Photography 2016

John Greengo

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

21. Wide Angle Lenses

Next Lesson: Telephoto Lenses

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

17:26
2

Welcome to Photography

13:08
3

Camera Types Overview

02:00
4

Viewing Systems

28:43
5

Viewing Systems Q&A

08:45
6

Lens Systems

32:06
7

Shutter Systems

13:17
8

Shutter Speeds

10:47
9

Choosing a Shutter Speed

31:30
10

Shutter Speeds for Handholding

08:36
11

Shutter Speed Pop Quiz

09:06
12

Camera Settings

25:35
13

General Camera Q&A

14:38
14

Sensor Sizes: The Basics

15:33
15

Sensor Sizes: Compared

19:10
16

Pixels

20:13
17

ISO

21:13
18

Sensor Q&A

13:34
19

Focal Length: Overview

11:09
20

Focal Length: Angle of View

15:09
21

Wide Angle Lenses

08:48
22

Telephoto Lenses

25:23
23

Angle of View Q&A

09:29
24

Fish Eye Lenses

10:39
25

Tilt & Shift Lenses

23:42
26

Subject Zone

17:19
27

Lens Speed

09:56
28

Aperture Basics

08:46
29

Depth of Field

21:49
30

Aperture Pop Quiz

13:23
31

Lens Quality

18:30
32

Photo Equipment Life Cycle

03:57
33

Light Meter Basics

09:25
34

Histogram

15:25
35

Histogram Pop Quiz and Q&A

10:58
36

Dynamic Range

06:03
37

Exposure Modes

15:58
38

Manual Exposure

09:38
39

Sunny 16 Rule

05:54
40

Exposure Bracketing

10:18
41

Exposure Values

27:21
42

Exposure Pop Quiz

26:43
43

Focus Overview

16:15
44

Focusing Systems

05:15
45

Autofocus Controls

11:56
46

Focus Points

07:35
47

Autofocusing on Subjects

20:19
48

Manual Focus

07:52
49

Digital Focusing Assistance

03:40
50

Focus Options: DSLR and Mirrorless

04:58
51

Shutter Speeds for Sharpness and DoF

05:20
52

Depth of Field Pop Quiz

12:14
53

Depth of Field Camera Features

04:54
54

Lens Sharpness

09:58
55

Camera Movement

05:20
56

Handheld and Tripod Focusing

04:32
57

Advanced Techniques

07:12
58

Hyperfocal Distance

06:50
59

Hyperfocal Quiz and Focusing Formula

04:36
60

Micro adjust and AF Fine Tune

05:34
61

Focus Stacking and Post Sharpening

06:00
62

Focus Problem Pop Quiz

18:07
63

The Gadget Bag: Camera Accessories

25:30
64

The Gadget Bag: Lens Accessories

12:46
65

The Gadget Bag: Neutral Density Filter

20:43
66

The Gadget Bag: Lens Hood and Teleconverters

08:55
67

The Gadget Bag: Lens Adapters

05:43
68

The Gadget Bag: Lens Cleaning Supplies

04:34
69

The Gadget Bag: Macro Lenses and Accessories

15:57
70

The Gadget Bag: Flash and Lighting

05:08
71

The Gadget Bag: Tripods and Accessories

18:50
72

The Gadget Bag: Custom Cases

11:20
73

10 Thoughts on Being a Photographer

07:37
74

Direct Sunlight

25:04
75

Indirect Sunlight

18:49
76

Sunrise and Sunset

18:39
77

Cloud Light

14:48
78

Golden Hour

09:50
79

Light Pop Quiz

07:53
80

Light Management

14:00
81

Artificial Light

13:56
82

Speedlights

16:02
83

Off-Camera Flash

27:38
84

Advanced Flash Techniques

09:49
85

Editing Overview

08:24
86

Editing Set-up

08:06
87

Importing Images

16:45
88

Best Use of Files and Folders

20:54
89

Culling

20:56
90

Develop: Fixing in Lightroom

18:13
91

Develop: Treating Your Images

10:53
92

Develop: Optimizing in Lightroom

14:51
93

Art of Editing Q&A

06:01
94

Composition Overview

06:53
95

Photographic Intrusions

10:10
96

Mystery and Working the Scene

16:18
97

Point of View

09:11
98

Better Backgrounds

16:02
99

Unique Perspective

11:02
100

Angle of View

15:06
101

Subject Placement

41:14
102

Subject Placement Q&A

05:18
103

Panorama

07:39
104

Multishot Techniques

13:57
105

Timelapse

16:13
106

Human Vision vs The Camera

20:07
107

Visual Perception

08:35
108

Visual Balance Test

22:56
109

Visual Drama

12:25
110

Elements of Design

28:57
111

The Photographic Process

12:28
112

Working the Shot

27:38
113

The Moment

04:42
114

One Hour Photo - Colby Brown

1:04:32
115

One Hour Photo - John Keatley

1:03:05
116

One Hour Photo - Art Wolfe

59:01
117

One Hour Photo - Rocco Ancora

1:01:20
118

One Hour Photo - Mike Hagen

1:01:20
119

One Hour Photo - Lisa Carney

1:00:52
120

One Hour Photo - Ian Shive

1:08:00
121

One Hour Photo - Sandra Coan

1:10:29
122

One Hour Photo - Daniel Gregory

1:06:07
123

One Hour Photo - Scott Robert Lim

1:05:41

Lesson Info

Wide Angle Lenses

Let's jump into the world of wide angle photography. So chances are you're gonna want a wide angle. Depending on what you do, depends a little bit on how wide you're gonna want to get. But I think most photographers are gonna want something that gets about this wide, a 24 millimeter lens. Now I have to admit that I particularly like the 24 millimeter lens. You'll find pretty much every photographer who's been shooting for a bit of time has favorite focal lengths for doing certain things, and 24 I just one of my general favorite. It's a nice wide lens without going too exotically wide. Now most cameras that are sold today are usually sold with like a 18 to 55 kit lens. And 18 is really close to 16 and I wish they had 16, but you know what 16 and 18 really aren't that far apart so it's not that big a deal. If you have an 18 to 55, this is very close to the wide angle end of those lenses. And so, my eye just kind of very naturally matches up with that 24 millimeter look. And so I think it...

's a great lens for travel photography and landscape photography which I do a lot of. And when we turn the camera vertically we're able to have subjects in the foreground and in the background and makes for a nice vertical story. Travel photography including a large bit of the environment around you but it's not so wide that things are distorted and people are going what's going on with this thing, it looks kind of weird, 'cause it's all strange shaped and so forth. And so including quite a bit of the environment around us. All right, so for the most part, the widest lens that most people would ever get would be a 16. That's a pretty extremely wide lens. You'll actually not find many photographers that have lenses that go down there, but it's pretty common. There's a lot of 16 to 35 lenses from Sony and Nikon and Canon and other manufacturers for instance. And this is nice when you just can't back up any further. In Morocco, in this beautiful shop that sells rugs, in the atrium they're hanging the rugs off of the three story balcony down into the middle. And so I'm looking up, and there's all these beautiful rugs, and so this was a lot of hard work folks. I had to lie down on a plush Moroccan rug and point the camera upwards. And when you're lying on your back, there's no way to back up, okay? And so the only way to back up is to go to the widest angle lens that you have, and so in this case a 16 millimeter lens was encompassing as much as it could possibly get lying on the floor looking straight up into this building. And so, not that only rainbows can only be shot with 16, but sometimes you're gonna need wider angle lenses. This was a little bit of a double rainbow. Wow, double rainbow. And so 16 is very common in landscape photography because you're able to get very close to your subjects and include other areas around it. And sometimes you're in an area that is just very interesting all around you. These lenses are really difficult to use because it's just very rare in my opinion that you are in an area where everything in front of you should be recorded and put on film. But every once in awhile you are in the right spot and it's often said that you shouldn't shoot people with wide angle lenses. Well, it depends on how you photograph them. In this case they are more towards the middle of the frame and they're less likely to have any sort of distortion on them, they're not completely filling the frame and so I don't think they look distorted or it's anything wrong with using a wide angle in people photography. If it's done in the correct manner. All right, some thoughts on the wide angle lens, and that is along the lines of distortion. That's one of the problems that you will hear about wide angle lenses. So I want to talk about what distortion is and isn't and how it affects your photos. There are a couple of different types of distortion. So here is one type of distortion that I think most all of us can agree is bad. You'll notice the horizon here. It's a little bit of curvature. Now I know the earth is round, at least I believe it to be round. My current belief, we're not gonna get into that. But that is not the way that it really looks when you're out there photographing it. This is a problem with the lens having barrel distortion on it. And so this is a better, straighter horizon, okay. And lenses have a distortion, in many cases wide angle lenses have a little bit of barrel distortion. This can be fixed sometimes in camera, and other times it can be fixed in software as well, and this is something that you probably want to fix. Unless you're trying to do some very special treatment to a photograph. And so this is bad distortion, I think most of us can agree, this is not good. We do not want this in our photographs. But there is another type of distortion, and so this is an example where I'm gonna be shooting at 35, 28, 24, 20, and 17. And as we zoom back with the lens, notice the size and shape of various things. So for instance we have an effect called foreshortening. It's an exaggerating of the size of the foreground in relationship to the background. So for instance, notice the walls, how much bigger they are on the side compared to where we go in the back. Because we know these are the same height but it's our perspective and our angle of view has this distortion. If you look at the ceiling panels, they're not square. I mean, they are square in reality, but because of our point of view in this, it is throwing off the sizing and they aren't correctly sized because we're using this extremely wide angled lens. And so this is a normal wide angle distortion, this is just what they do, because that's what they do. It's just the nature of the wide angle lens, and so it's natural. And we can use it to our benefit. It exaggerates the size of objects in the foreground. I mean this seems like this is Alice in Wonderland and you could jump through this it's so big. But this is, you know, a relatively small little knot hole in the log but because I've placed the camera so close to it with the wide angle lens, it seems like it's very, very large. And so this is something that is used by landscape photographers a lot. They find a subject in the foreground that isn't all that big. This rock here on the right hand photo, that rock is about a foot across. But if I get the camera really close to it, it's pretty significant in the frame. And so getting close to my subject, I can really have it fill up the frame. And you know in a natural area like this, it's hard to tell any sort of distortion because you're not sure if they're straight lines or where those straight lines would be. So effective use of the wide angle lens. So if you are interested in getting a wide lens, some thoughts about this. This is a good lens when you just can't back up any further, so if you're a real estate photographer and you're trying to photograph a small room, you need a wide angle lens most likely. If you want to show a subject within their environment, you're gonna photograph somebody in their kitchen and you want to show their beautiful kitchen, wide angle lens, having them in there, that's a good choice. And so your foreground subjects are gonna appear larger in size. So anything in the foreground is gonna be pretty significant so you gotta be very careful about how you frame and where you position yourself with these types of lenses. Now we're gonna be talking about depth of field in the next section, and there's a lot of people who really like that shallow depth of field look. And that is really challenging, it's not impossible, but it's very very challenging to get shallow depth of field with these wide lenses, in 24 and 16 millimeter lens. Most of those photos that you were just looking back, if you're watching this on tape, rewind 'em, go look at those photos again. Very few of 'em had shallow depth of field. And caution when using people at less than 24 millimeter lens. And so if you were shooting a group shot, you gotta shoot the company group photo and you got 30 people in the photo. I would try to use something 24 or longer, 35 or or something like that. If you shoot the group photo at 16 and you put the boss over in the corner, they're gonna look like a cone head. Not gonna be happy about that one, all right. So some thoughts on the wide lens.

Class Materials

Free Download

Fundamentals of Photography Outline

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Learning Project Videos
Learning Projects PDF
Slides for The Camera Lessons 1-13
Slides for The Sensor Lessons 14-18
Slides for The Lens Lessons 19-31
Slides for The Exposure Lessons 32-42
Slides for Focus Lessons 43-62
Slides for The Gadget Bag Lessons 63-72
Slides for Light Lesson 73-84
Slides for the Art of Edit Lessons 85-93
Slides for Composition Lesson 94-105
Slides for Photographic Vision Lessons 106-113

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Love love all John Greengo classes! Wish to have had him decades ago with this info, but no internet then!! John is the greatest photography teacher I have seen out there, and I watch a lot of Creative Live classes and folks on YouTube too. John is so detailed and there are a ton of ah ha moments for me and I know lots of others. I think I own 4 John Greengo classes so far and want to add this one and Travel Photography!! I just drop everything to watch John on Creative Live. I wish sometime soon he would teach a Lightroom class and his knowledge on photography post editing.!!! That would probably take a LOT OF TIME but I know John would explain it soooooo good, like he does all his Photography classes!! Thank you Creative Live for having such a wonderful instructor with John Greengo!! Make more classes John, for just love them and soak it up! There is soooo much to learn and sometimes just so overwhelming. Is there anyway you might do a Motivation class!!?? Like do this button for this day, and try this technique for a week, or post this subject for this week, etc. Motivation and inspiration, and playing around with what you teach, needed so much and would be so fun.!! Just saying??? Awaiting gadgets class now, while waiting for lunch break to be over. All the filters and gadgets, oh my. Thank you thank you for all you teach John, You are truly a wonderful wonderful instructor and I would highly recommend folks listening and buying your classes.

Eve
 

I don't think that adjectives like beautiful, fantastic or excellent can describe the course and classes with John Greengo well enough. I've just bought my first camera and I am a total amateur but I fell in love with photography while watching the classes with John. It is fun, clear, understandable, entertaining, informative and and and. He is not only a fabulous photographer but a great teacher as well. Easy to follow, clear explanations and fantastic visuals. The only disadvantage I can list here that he is sooooo good that keeps me from going out to shoot as I am just glued to the screen. :-) Don't miss it and well worth the money invested! Thank you John!

Vlad Chiriacescu
 

Wow! John is THE best teacher I have ever had the pleasure of learning from, and this is the most comprehensive, eloquent and fun course I have ever taken (online or off). If you're even / / interested in photography, take this course as soon as possible! You might find out that taking great photos requires much more work than you're willing to invest, or you might get so excited learning from John that you'll start taking your camera with you EVERYWHERE. At the very least, you'll learn the fundamental inner workings and techniques that WILL help you get a better photo. Worried about the cost? Well, I've taken courses that are twice as expensive that offer less than maybe a tenth of the value. You'll be much better off investing in this course than a new camera or a new lens. I cannot reccomend John and this course enough!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES