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Any lens under about 35mm on a full-frame body counts as wide. What it does to a picture is less about cramming things in and more about how it treats distance. Put something close to the front element, and it swells. Everything behind it falls away faster than your eye would expect. That's the whole trick, and photographers who don't understand it end up with wide empty pictures of nice views.
Below: what the different focal lengths do, how to set up for depth, the two kinds of distortion that get muddled together, and how the lens behaves for landscape, buildings, and people.
What is wide-angle in photography?
Roughly speaking, wide-angle means a field of view broader than what your eye pays attention to comfortably under 35mm on full frame.
What each focal length gives you
35mm barely counts. You get a bit more at the sides than your eye takes in, and that is about the extent of it. Most people use it for street work and reportage, where the point is to show someone in a place without the lens announcing itself.
24mm is the one most photographers reach for. Close enough foreground exaggeration to give you depth, but you can still put a person near the edge of the frame without them looking stretched. If you're buying one wide lens and can't decide, buy this.
16mm to 20mm is where the lens stops being neutral and starts showing up in the picture. A rock a couple of feet from you will take up half the frame. Tilt up at a building and the walls really lean. Whether that's good or awful depends entirely on whether you've found a decent foreground.
14mm and below is fairly niche. You'll find it on letting agents photographing bathrooms the size of a cupboard, on astro people trying to fit the Milky Way in, and on anyone who wants the distortion to be the point. Hard to shoot with it and not end up with something that looks like a demonstration of what the lens does.
Crop sensors change the number.
Focal length belongs to the glass. How much of what the glass projects you actually record depends on the sensor behind it.
So a 16mm on an APS-C body frames up about like a 24mm would on full frame. Nikon and Sony crop at 1.5×, Canon at 1.6×. Micro Four Thirds doubles it, which turns that same 16mm into something closer to a 32mm and not really wide at all.
People get caught by this all the time. Buy a 16–35mm for a crop body expecting drama, and you've bought a 24–52mm. Worth knowing what your own camera does with a focal length before you spend money on one.
How do I take a wide-angle photo?
Three things. Get these right, and most of the rest sorts itself out.
1. Put something within three feet of the lens
This is the one. Leave the foreground empty, and there's nothing for the exaggeration to grab hold of, so you've taken a wide, flat photograph of scenery.
Handily, wide lenses tend to focus very close. A 16–35mm will usually go down to around 28cm, so you can practically rest the front element on a rock or a clump of grass and still have it sharp.
When you arrive somewhere, spend as much time hunting for that near thing as you do photographing the far one. The far one is why you stopped the car. It's the bit you already have.
2. Lower the camera
Nearly everyone photographs from wherever their eyes happen to be, which for most of us is somewhere around 1.6 meters. Knee height is better. Get down to about fifteen centimeters off the ground and you're looking at a different picture entirely — the nearby stuff swells up, the ground carries your eye off toward the horizon, and that flat postcard quality you couldn't shift just goes.
Kneeling on a pavement in front of other people is a bit embarrassing. Worth it, though. There isn't much else you can change that takes two seconds and does that much.
3. Walk, don't zoom
Say there's a rock you want in the foreground. Step twice toward it at 16mm, and it'll about double in size, while the hills behind barely budge. Try the same two steps at 85mm, and nothing much happens at all. At short focal lengths your feet do far more to a composition than the zoom ring ever will.
So walk round the thing first. Get in close, closer than feels right, then back off a foot or so. You'll almost always end up nearer than you expected to.
Camera settings for wide-angle photography
Aperture: f/8 to f/11 is the working range
Open up past f/5.6, and the foreground you worked so hard to find goes soft, which rather wastes the effort. Stop down past f/16 and diffraction takes the edge off everything, so you trade sharpness across the frame for depth you probably didn't need.
Everything here assumes you're already comfortable with how aperture, shutter speed and ISO pull against each other. If that's still shaky, go and read up on the exposure triangle before the rest of this will be much use.
Focus: the practical hyperfocal rule
Focus at the hyperfocal distance and everything from half that distance to infinity comes back acceptably sharp. Plenty of charts and apps will work out the exact figure for a given lens and aperture. In practice, you're not going to stop and check one with the light going, so most people learn two or three numbers for the lenses they use and leave it at that.
Some rough numbers for full frame: at 16mm and f/11, hyperfocal lands around 0.8 meters, so focus there and you hold from roughly 40cm to the horizon. At 24mm and f/11 it's nearer 1.8 meters, holding from about 90cm out.
In practice, focus about a third of the way into the scene and get on with it. Crop sensors shorten these distances, which makes life easier.
Shutter speed and stability
A wide lens forgives camera shake in a way a 200mm never will, so you can hand-hold slower than you're used to. Useful, right up until you want everything sharp front to back at f/11 with the light going.
Below 1/15 second, put the camera on something. And if you're deliberately going slow for water or clouds or to turn a crowd into a smear, everything in long exposure photography still applies, just over a wider frame.
Filters and vignetting
Put two filters on a wide lens, and the corners will darken. There isn't much room to play with — the front element already sees out close to the inside edge of the filter ring, and a standard mount adds enough thickness to intrude on the frame. Slim mounts are made for this, and below 20mm they're worth the money rather than something to work around.
Graduated NDs are also fiddlier here than on a standard lens. The transition covers more of the frame, so it shows up badly over a ragged horizon full of trees or rooftops. When you can't place one cleanly, shoot a bracket and blend it later.
Sun stars
Stop a wide lens down to f/16 or f/22 and point lights turn into stars. Even number of aperture blades, you get that many points. Odd number, you get double. Nine blades give you eighteen points.
Tuck the sun partly behind a rock edge, or the corner of a building, and the star comes out cleaner than if you shoot straight into it.
Wide-angle distortion: two different problems
Most articles lump all distortion together. There are two kinds, and you can only fix one of them.
Barrel distortion — optical, and fixable
Straight lines bow outward, and it's worst toward the edges. You'll see a flat horizon curve up through the middle of the frame, or a doorframe belly out slightly at the sides.
Because this one is the glass doing it, software can undo it. Lens profiles know precisely how a given lens bends light, so the correction is close to perfect. Rectilinear designs are built to minimize it in the first place, and fisheyes go the other way and make it the whole point of the lens.
Perspective distortion — geometric, and not fixable
Different thing entirely. This is what stretches objects out toward the corners and inflates whatever sits nearest the lens. A face in the corner of a 20mm frame looks pulled sideways. A nose shot from 30cm looks like a nose shot from 30cm.
No profile will touch it. Your distance from the subject is what creates it, so the only fixes are physical: step back, or move the subject away from the edge of the frame.
Keystoning — the converging verticals
Point a wide lens up at a building, and the sides lean in toward each other. Point it down, and they splay out.
Usually people call this a mistake, and often it is. If you're photographing a flat for a letting agent, the walls need to be parallel, and the correction takes about ten seconds. But shoot the same building from close and low, with verticals racing in toward the top, and it stops looking like an error and starts looking deliberate. Work out which you want before you drag the slider.
One thing to remember: straightening keystoning crops the frame, sometimes by a lot. Compose a bit loose if you know you'll be correcting it later.
Wide-angle for landscape photography
Why most landscape wide shots fail
Point a wide lens at a mountain range, and it goes small. Standing there, the range filled your vision. In the photograph, it's a thin strip across the top third, and you can't work out why it looked so good at the time.
The lens wants a near thing and a far thing. Give it a stream in the foreground running back toward those same mountains, and you get some of that scale back.
Composition at wide focal lengths
A big frame isn't an invitation to fill it. If you can't say in a sentence what the picture is of, it's probably not of anything, and a wide lens hands you more room to be woolly than any other focal length.
Thirds still work at 16mm. What catches people out is that the intersections end up further apart than they look through the finder, so something you were sure you'd put on a third turns out closer to the middle when you get it home. That's a viewfinder problem rather than a compositional one. The principles of composition hold at any focal length — a wide lens is just quicker to expose a weak composition than a long one is.
Keep the horizon level.
A degree out at 16mm and you'll see it. The same degree at 50mm and nobody notices. Some of that is the barrel distortion at work: in a wide frame, a sloping horizon comes out looking bent rather than tilted, which bothers people even when they can't put their finger on why. Switch the electronic level on and leave it there.
Wide-angle for architecture and interiors
Rooms are the one place you don't get to choose. A 50mm won't take in a small bedroom no matter where you stand in it, so out comes the wide lens whether you wanted it or not.
Two things to get into the habit of. Keep the camera level. A level camera gives you verticals that are already parallel, so there's nothing to straighten later, and when an architectural photographer wants more ceiling in the shot, they'll raise the tripod instead of tipping the camera up. Then keep an eye on your corners. That's where barrel distortion and perspective stretch both land at once, on the door frames and skirting boards that everyone looking at the picture expects to be straight.
Wide-angle for portraits and people
The distance rule
People say wide lenses are unflattering for portraits. That's a bit loose. Distance is what creates the problem.
Fill the frame with a face at 24mm, and you're standing very close, and from there the nose is proportionally much nearer the lens than the ears, so it renders bigger. Back off to three meters with the same lens, let the person sit smaller in the frame, and the proportions come right.
Environmental portraits
Here's where the lens pays for itself with people. Somebody in their kitchen, under a car, on a corner with an instrument — an environmental portrait says more about a person than a tight headshot does.
The stretch is worst in the corners of a wide frame, so a face put there gets pulled. On a rock formation, that treatment often improves things. On a person, it doesn't. Keep whoever you're photographing inside the middle two-thirds, and you won't have the problem.
Common wide-angle mistakes
Empty foreground
Comes up more than everything else put together. If there's nothing within a few feet of the lens, the perspective has nothing to exaggerate.
Shooting from eye level
If you never crouch or climb anything, your pictures of a place will look much like everyone else's pictures of that place.
Backing up instead of stepping in
The instinct when something won't fit in the frame is to walk backward. That tends to make things worse at wide focal lengths, since your subject gets smaller and the foreground loses whatever hold it had on the composition. Better to move in and find a different arrangement.
Faces in the corners
Perspective stretches whatever ends up at the edges. Move people in toward the middle.
Correcting every trace of distortion
Perfectly straight lines are accurate and often dull. Correct it where it pulls the eye. Leave it where it's doing something.
Using a wide lens for the wrong reason
"It fits more in" won't carry a picture by itself. No near element, no converging lines, and a normal focal length will give you the same image with less distortion.
Two exercises worth doing
The ten-foot session
Shoot for a couple of hours without straying more than three meters from where you started. No wandering off to find something better. It's frustrating, and it teaches you to look at what's actually around you faster than anything else, which is the whole skill with a wide lens.
A month on one lens
Four weeks, wide only. Nothing longer in the bag. When you can't reach for a 70–200mm, you start finding wide compositions in places you'd never have bothered looking — kitchens, bus stops, the inside of a car.
Both come at the same habit from different directions. Wide-angle pictures go wrong through not paying attention far more often than through owning the wrong lens, and restriction is what forces attention. There's another side to it too. A wide lens can't record a scene neutrally, so deciding where to stand becomes a decision about what the scene is about, which is a large part of what people are getting at when they talk about developing a photographic voice.
Frequently asked questions
What is considered wide-angle in photography?
On full frame, anything under about 35mm. Photographers tend to split it three ways: 24 to 35mm is moderately wide, 16 to 24mm is properly wide, and below 16mm is ultra-wide. Shooting APS-C, multiply whatever's on the barrel by 1.5 to compare — 1.6 on Canon.
How do I take a good wide-angle photo?
Find something interesting within a meter of the lens, get below eye level, and shoot at f/8 to f/11, focusing about a third into the scene. Those three cover most of it.
Why do my wide-angle photos look empty?
Nine times out of ten there's nothing in the foreground. The lens works on the relationship between near and far, so when everything's far away there's no relationship to work on and the picture goes flat.
Is wide-angle bad for portraits?
No, though it's easy to make it look that way. Proximity to the lens is what stretches a face, and the number printed on the barrel has little to do with it. A 24mm at four feet will do unkind things to someone's features. The same lens at eight feet, with them sitting in the middle two-thirds of the frame, gives you a portrait that shows the person and where they are.
