How to Use a Wide-Angle Lens the Right Way

Hey, what's up guys, professional landscape photographer David Johnston here, on location at a waterfall in Tennessee. And with this waterfall, what I want to do is use my wide angle lens to really capture a huge foreground, and then get the waterfall in there in the background as well, really featuring it nicely in a composition. But how do you use your wide angle lens correctly in compositions to really accentuate that foreground, but then keeping the waterfall big in the background? What a wide angle lens tends to do is elongate and stretch those foregrounds to suck you into the entire frame and composition. But then in the background, sometimes those features get lost, because they seem smaller than they actually do in real life to your eye.

So what I want to do is get into the camera in this composition, and show you exactly what you need to do to maximize your wide angle lens composition. So just taking you through this process and what my setup is right now, I'm shooting at 2.5 seconds, F16, ISO 100, and I'm using a circular polarizer to remove the glare off of the surface of the water. What that is gonna do is gonna allow me to feature the foreground element, which is these rocks, moving back into the waterfall to really accentuate those, and be able to pull you into the frame. But getting the waterfall as big as I want is gonna be a challenge. We can do one shot featuring what we have set up with the foreground right now, but that waterfall just isn't featured the right way yet.

What I can do here though, is tilt my camera down just a little bit. What that's going to achieve is it's going to allow me to get more foreground, and more leading lines to be able to suck you into the frame. But it's also going to pull that waterfall taller, because at the edges of a wide angle lens, you get more distortion and more stretching of your features, because of the wide angle lens technology. That's gonna make your waterfall look taller and bigger than it does in the shot that we just took. Let's try this out.

This composition technique is a really good one to use whenever you're dealing with those giant foregrounds that you're using with your wide angle lens photography, but also a really good technique to use when you're dealing with distances further away. This works great when you're dealing with foregrounds and mountains in the background, because you don't want your mountains to get lost in the background and seem very small within the frame. You want to keep those looking pretty large. So you're wanting to use this technique with your wide angle lenses to maximize the features within your frame, working with the lens not against it and using it in the correct way.