Category: Photography

What is a Wide-angle lens? It is a lens with shorter focal length than that of a typical lens. For a 35mm camera, lenses of focal length 35 mm or less are considered wide-angle. Most wide angle lens ranges from 15-35 mm.

Wide-angle lenses have three main characteristics.

1. Wide angle lenses can have large angles of view. Because of that they can be used to capture a wide horizontal view. The angle of view becomes greater as the focal length of the lens becomes smaller. Some of these lenses can actually cover an area wider than what the human eye can see.

2. They can have a greater depth of field(DOF) than other types of lens.

3. They increase perspective. Objects in the foreground appears large but quickly tapering off into the background. We can use this characteristic for creating more visually impactful composition. The closer you get to the subject, the bigger it will be in the frame and thus the more striking the photo will be.

A particular problem of wide angle lens is Barrel distortion. It is the distortion when horizontal and vertical lines in the photo become curved.

Wide-angle lens are most commonly used in landscape photography. This is because it can cover all lot of area which is useful for this genre of photography.

Some of the manufacturers of wide angle lens for SLRs and DSLRS are Cosina, Tokina, Tamron, Nikon, Canon and Sigma.

Sigma 15-30mm Wide-angle lens

Well, in a nutshell, this is some of the information on wide-angle lenses. Hope that it is useful and informative.

Thank you for reading.