How to Use a Wide Angle Lens

landscape photographers it is with great sadness that today I must announce that me and Zeiss distagon 21 are parting ways you see for the past few months I'd say possibly the past six months I just have not been using this lens and this was once my most treasured possession the favorite lens in my repertoire but since upgrading to the mark to 24 to 70 and I've just never needed this lens I've never been asked to justify the additional three millimeters of focal length which this offers so what I've found is over the you know it's just been sat on my shelf for six months gathering dust and that should never be the case because this is a beautiful beautiful piece of glass so you may be asking yourselves are you replacing it and I am happy to say that yes I am replacing this so the extra three millimeters of focal length with this lens wasn't enough for me to justify taking this around the world and everywhere with me so I'm selling this and replacing it with this this is a Canon 16 to 35 millimeter f/4 lens up by the way this video is not sponsored by canon this was totally bought out of my own money and I will hopefully be replacing the cost of this with this so I've got this lens today and I'm very very excited to hopefully go and shoot with it in this video and and there are several reasons why I bought this lens and some of you may be asking yourselves Tom why did you get the f4 and not the F 2.8 mark 3 and there are a couple of reasons the F 1635 F 2.8 Mach 3 is a superb lens but it also comes with a superb price tag of about 16 or 17 hundred pounds it's also a lot heavier than this now the quality of this lens which is the four is phenomenal and the truth is I don't know if the mark 32.8 is better than this lens I'm sure I could find a graph somewhere that tells me but I honestly believe that side by side you won't be able to notice a difference I you know f11 or whatever so okay now it's two things cost and weight now I don't really do Astro photography so I therefore I do not believe that I need the f 2.8 so for me it's all about landscapes you know sunrise sunset stormy skies etc so f4 is fine I'm probably never gonna shoot a less than F 5.6 if I'm honest and it's a little bit lighter than the 2.8 so let's see it that's why I bought it and I have said on several occasions that 24 millimeter is wide enough and in most cases 24 millimeter is wide enough but I have found myself in situations recently where I wished I had a wider focal length than 24 millimeters and this has happened to me like three or four times recently and I finally bit the bullet and made the decision to buy a wide lens I'm gonna become a wide boy now this isn't so I can get everything in you know these grand vistas but actually what I really like the idea of is getting really low to the ground with a wide lens and emphasizing that foreground then really making the foreground the main subject of stretching it off into the distance up to some cool subject with that the sky a building cliff some waves I really don't know so after being in several situations where I'm like damn I wish I had two 1635 there comes a point when you have to say okay I'm gonna buy 1635 so that's what I've done so without further ado I'd like to introduce you to the latest member of my lens family old 1635 F 4 and I haven't got a watch on and it's now cracking on towards late afternoon so I think I'm gonna go and test it I can confirm the weather outside is terrible but I still want to go and see if I can find Vin's issue so I'm gonna head to the beach have a bit of a one let's see if I can find some awesome foreground to emphasize accentuate whatever you know stretch off stretch off what right so I yeah let's go shoot and if tonight's rubbish which yet probably is going to be and almost we're gonna go out tomorrow morning and I really want to show you guys the best way to use a wide-angle lens right let's go you see the thing with landscape photography is you really need to shoot to the conditions so when life gives you lemons you got to make lemon pie and when life gives you grey miserable conditions you've got a pretty much shoot grey miserable images but trust me that it's not necessarily a bad thing [Music] so the trick is to come to a location that you know will work well with the conditions you have and I am so lucky to live on the gorgeous gorgeous so lucky to live on the gorgeous north east coast of England ah don't you just hate it when other photographers turn up when you're at a location and you think you have it all to yourself damn those pesky photographers damn them all now I'm joking I'm joking all photographers welcome always you ever see me out and about with a camera please do say you come do come and say hello always happy to talk [Music] so what did I say before in the office so is all that emphasized in the foreground and that is exactly what I'm doing here I've picked this spot in particular so the reason the reason I've chosen this spot is just to emphasize these wonderful round stones with the gorgeous detail on them and so the first thing I'm gonna do is just tweak my composition shift a bit left shift a bit right make sure I get everything arranged as I want it I've probably got about 15 minutes workable light but it's not too bad I'm here I'm only here for one image so really no stress so I'm going to take my time see if I can arrange these boulders just how I want and then we'll discuss a few technical things and filters and other stuff as well right excuse me well I perfect my composition [Music] okay so basically our vid was just walk around this very small area handheld and just look at different compositions what I wanted to do was I really wanted to emphasize the boulders in the foreground or in particular one bulb in particular one Boulder which is right in front of my lens now because of physics it's gonna be impossible for me to get this image sharp from front to back so I'm just putting on it just putting on a filter ring here another tip with wide-angle lenses it will pay dividends for you to get a wide-angle filter adapter filter ring I could have got this is 77 mill I could have got a 77 mil standard filter ring or fight an extra 10 quid get the wide-angle version and all that does it means that your filters sit closer to your lens so you get less vignetting it's worth the extra bit of money so well tip right now this is the Lee polarizer apparently no vignetting up to 16 milk I've shot it at 18 million there was no vignetting so curious to see what happens here I'm sure it'll be fine so this is more or less what the image looks like with no polarizer but by adding the polarization or introducing it so you take all the glare off the water there and you actually reveal a lot more detail on that rock that you can see there see the prominent rock that's that's what I'm after so yeah polarizer awesome on wet rocks so another filter I'm dropping in is a to stop hard edge to stops fine and this son is way over to the west I'm shooting in a suddenly direction there's no Sun anyway because of all the cloud in the sky so all this is gonna do it's just hold back the detail in the lovely moody sky and that's what I'm after now I mentioned before I was talking about physics so it's impossible to get sharpness from front to back and when I say from the back I mean 16 inches - you know a mile or something like that impossible so try not to worry about it so I'm doing with this image is once I've set up my composition and I'm happy I'm going to take this image three times and each time I'm going to focus at a different point in the photograph excuse me I'm just putting in my trigger so the first time I'm gonna focus this to infinity which I'm basically means I'm photographing or sorry I'm focusing the furthest point away from the lens which is the castle in the background so we're looking at a four second exposure f9 iso 100 first image focus on the castle in the background now that's going to give me sharpness for most of the image so the next focal point or the next point in the image that I'm focusing is approximately one third into the image the last place I'm gonna focus and this is probably the most important place is this Boulder which is immediately in front of me here everything's fully manual so the exposure doesn't change the camera composition doesn't change everything's locked off it's just a case of shift in the focus ah and that's it that's pretty much it so when I blend the images in Photoshop it's you get a lovely sharp image from front to back as you can see now [Music] so I said I hope you've hope you've taken something away from this video with the wide lens not necessarily being there to get everything in but rather you know emphasize the foreground and in my case it was these wonderful boulders yeah we've enjoyed the video so thank you so much watching the tide is coming in the light is fading and it's definitely time for me to go so until next time thanks so much for watching bye for now [Music]

Channel: Thomas Heaton

Views: 843,540

Keywords: landscape photography, landscape photography tutorial, landscape photography hints tips, landscape photography tips techniques, how to use a wide angle lens, wide angle photography, canon 16-35mm f4, seascapes, outdoor photography, landscape photography northumberland, landscape photography vlog, photography on location, behind the scenes, canon 5d mkiv, canon 5d, canon 5d mark iv, beach photography, best photography locations UK

Id: Un_LjLBB9M4

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 15 2017