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A Wider World – Ultra Wide Angle Opens a New World
Discover how an ultra-wide-angle lens can transform everyday scenes into extraordinary images. Photographer Glynn Lavender shares five creative tips for capturing dramatic perspectives, emphasizing depth, and finding inspiration in unexpected places.
Author & Images: Glynn Lavender
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Discover how an ultra-wide-angle lens can transform everyday scenes into extraordinary images. Photographer Glynn Lavender shares five creative tips for capturing dramatic perspectives, emphasizing depth, and finding inspiration in unexpected places. From getting closer to your subject to experimenting with leading lines, unique angles, and motion, Glynn demonstrates how the TAMRON 12-20mm F2.8 opens up exciting new creative possibilities. Learn how seeing the world through a wider lens can bring a fresh perspective to your photography.
TIP 1: Get Close And Use The Expanse
It is no secret that I am a big fan of ultra wide-angle lenses. There is something special that happens when you raise your camera to your eye and you have a lens on that is wide, your entire viewpoint of the world changes in an instant.
One of my favorite tactics, when shooting ultra-wide, is “get close and use the expanse” to create drama.
Shooting as wide as 12mm allows you to get much closer physically to your main subject whilst keeping it all in the frame. This gives your subject a commanding presence in the image.
We want our main subject to be the star of the shot, and sure, you can fit your object in with almost any lens but the big difference with wide and close is the expanse of the scene you get to see behind your main subject, in this case a beautifully coloured sunset that really elevates the image. Imagine this shot without the expanse of the sunset!
So go wide and get close – it will open a whole new world of shooting for you.
TIP 2: Turn Nothing Into Something
We’ve all been there, we’re walking around a location looking for something to take images of, but nothing is really calling out to us, nothing is grabbing our creative eye. It all looks a bit generic. That was EXACTLY how I was feeling walking around my city on this night. In fact, I only went down this alley as a shortcut on the way to what I hoped would be somewhere more photographic.
Now I have a habit when I am walking along of continually bringing my camera to my eye, point and scoping out what’s in front of me. Zooming the lens throughout its range. I am always trying to see the world in front of me with a different set of “eyes” thru the view finder. You’d be amazed how often a scene that you considered uninspiring can change when you use these new “eyes”. That’s what happened in this instance, a boring alley became a tunnel of lines, shapes and colours that instantly lit up my creative eye. My new 12mm “eyes” seem to be forever opening new creative ideas that my other lenses did not reveal to show me.
TIP 3: Don’t Forget To Look Up
I run photography tours and one of my mantras to my clients is “Don’t forget to look up” so often we are walking around with our eyes darting left and right looking for things to shoot that we forget to look up and see what elements may be in a scene that can either be our main subject or an element in our scene.
In this instance the dominant object while looking up was the Fibonacci Swirl of the underneath of this staircase. To the naked eye it looked fabulous, but it was big, very BIG!
If I had been here two weeks earlier, I’m not sure I would have managed to capture it the way it felt, my widest lens at that point was 16mm but on this night I was trying out the new 12-20mm f2.8 and boy did I need that extra 4mm of coverage.
Suddenly the shot became possible and the angles I wanted were working out. People often ask me does a few mm of focal length really make a difference and my answer, especially on the wide-angle side of things, is always YES – it opens new worlds and makes new shots possible!
TIP 4: Lines Equal Depth
Nothing turns a 2D image into a 3D perspective faster than dramatic lines and if there is one thing an ultra-wide-angle lens does exceptionally well is create strong lines.
If you can step out onto the street to see how the world looks at 12mm, look how even the clouds seem to be creating lines and creative elements for you to use in your composition.
It never ceases to amaze me just how cool our everyday world looks at such a wide angle. Now imagine how cool it will make somewhere amazing look!
TIP 5: Wide With Time-A Wonderful Combination
As photographers we often strive to show the world in ways others don’t see.
Time is one of our greatest tools for achieving this. Even a small slowing of time like in this one shot at 1/25th of a second creates that sense of movement that our eyes will never see. When we look into the photo, we can almost hear the “woosh” as the people seem to fly past. This technique brings a photo to life and when you combine that with the powerful perspective, we get from an ultra-wide-angle lenses we can create depth, life, movement and drama all in 1/25th of a second.
TIP 6: Combination Shooting
Of course, none of these tips happen in isolation, I am always trying to find ways to combines as many of these creative elements into one shot. This one uses at least three tips.
Get close for drama, using lines for the depth and movement to show life
Trying different combinations of tips and tricks is all part of the fun of being creative.
