A wide-angle lens is one with a focal length of about 35mm or shorter in full-frame terms, and an ultra-wide is shorter than 24mm. It takes in a wide view, which makes far things small and lets near things loom large, so the way to use one well is to get close: put something interesting within a metre or two of the camera, keep the camera level so vertical lines stay vertical, keep people away from the corners where shapes stretch, and shoot at f/8 to f/11 focused a metre or two away so everything from the foreground to the horizon is sharp.
Below: what counts as wide on each sensor, the one idea that explains almost everything a wide lens does, why wide shots so often look empty and how to fix that, edge stretch, leaning buildings, focus, flare, filters, rooms, streets and night skies, and when a wide lens is the wrong tool. The sibling entry on the ultra-wide lens covers the extreme end of the range, and foreground interest goes deeper on choosing a foreground. This page is about handling the lens.
What counts as wide and ultra-wide
Width is about angle of view, which depends on both focal length and sensor size. The usual reference is the full-frame sensor, 36 by 24mm. To find the lens that gives the same view on a smaller sensor, divide by the crop factor.
| Full-frame focal length | Horizontal angle of view | Diagonal angle of view | Same view on APS-C (1.5x) | Same view on Micro Four Thirds (2x) | Category |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 35mm | 54 degrees | 63 degrees | 23mm | 17mm | Moderate wide |
| 28mm | 65 degrees | 75 degrees | 19mm | 14mm | Wide |
| 24mm | 74 degrees | 84 degrees | 16mm | 12mm | Wide |
| 20mm | 84 degrees | 94 degrees | 13mm | 10mm | Ultra-wide |
| 16mm | 97 degrees | 107 degrees | 11mm | 8mm | Ultra-wide |
| 14mm | 104 degrees | 114 degrees | 9mm | 7mm | Ultra-wide |
Lens specifications usually quote the diagonal angle, corner to corner. The horizontal angle, side to side across a landscape frame, is the one that matches what you see across the viewfinder. Both are correct; just compare like with like.
The main camera on most phones sees roughly what a 24 to 28mm lens sees on full frame, and the “0.5x” camera is an ultra-wide of about 13 to 16mm. It is not a different kind of lens, only a shorter focal length, and everything on this page applies to it. All the lenses in the table are rectilinear, meaning they draw straight lines as straight. A fisheye lens is a different design that covers an even wider angle by letting straight lines curve.
The lens frames, your position shapes
The most repeated idea about wide lenses is that they “distort perspective”. They do not. Stand in one place and take the same scene at 16mm and at 48mm, then crop the 16mm frame down to the middle third of its width: the two pictures match, line for line, except that the crop has fewer pixels. From one spot, the focal length only decides how much of the view you include.
What changes the look is distance. The size of anything in the picture is proportional to the focal length divided by its distance from the lens. Because a wide lens shows so much, you naturally walk closer to fill it, and when you are close, a small change in distance makes a big change in size. A rock half a metre away and a mountain 20 kilometres away are 40,000 times different in distance, so they are drawn wildly different in size. That exaggerated near and far is the wide-angle look, and it comes from where you stand.
The tool below lets you prove it: change the focal length and your distance, and watch what grows. Keep the person the same size and the background shrinks as you step closer with a wider lens. Stand still and a wider lens only adds more round the edges.
One more thing changes how a wide picture looks: how far you view it from. A photo looks natural when your eye sits at the same angle to it that the lens had to the scene. For a 16mm full-frame shot printed 36 centimetres wide, that is 16 centimetres from the print. Seen from across a room or as a small thumbnail, the same picture looks stretched and deep. That is why wide shots often feel more natural large and close than small on a phone.
Want the geometry of why near things look so big, in the centre of the frame as well as at the edges? Perspective distortion works through it with numbers.
Why wide shots look empty
Size is focal length over distance, so a wide lens draws everything far away small. A mountain 2,000 metres high and 20 kilometres away fills about 42 percent of the frame height at 100mm, 21 percent at 50mm and under 7 percent at 16mm. The scene that looked overwhelming to your eye becomes a thin strip between a large sky and an empty stretch of ground.
There are only two fixes. Either use a longer lens to make the far thing bigger, as explained in lens compression, or keep the wide lens and put something else in the empty part of the frame. A wide lens is a tool for near things with a setting behind them. It is not a tool for fitting everything in.
Is the distant peak the whole point of the picture? The telephoto photography guide covers making far things big.
Get close: build the frame from the foreground back
The same arithmetic that shrinks the mountain makes near objects huge. A rock 30 centimetres high takes up 10 percent of the frame height at 16mm from 2 metres away, 20 percent from 1 metre and 40 percent from half a metre. Meanwhile the mountain has not changed at all. Halving your distance to the foreground doubles its size and leaves the background alone. The boulders in the opening photo are close to a 17mm lens, which is why they fill half the frame while a whole bay sits small behind them.
A working method:
- Find the foreground first. Look for something with shape, texture or colour within two metres of where you can stand: rocks, flowers, ripples in sand, a puddle, cracked mud, a rail, a painted line.
- Move in until it feels too close. At 16 to 20mm, a foreground object should often be 50 centimetres to 1 metre from the lens. If it looks small on the screen, you are still too far away.
- Set the camera height. Low (knee height or less) makes the foreground loom and hides the middle distance behind it. Higher (chest height) shrinks the foreground a little and reveals the ground between near and far. Try both, because the middle distance is what connects the two.
- Check the link to the background. A line that runs from the foreground towards the far subject, such as a stream, a path or a row of stones, ties the picture together. See leading lines, and foreground, midground and background for building all three layers.
- Check the edges. A wide frame collects stray branches, your own feet, tripod legs and your shadow. Look round all four sides before pressing the shutter.
There is one honest exception to “get close”. A wide lens can also make a small subject feel small on purpose: one figure, one tree or one boat in a great expanse of sky or sand, with the emptiness as the subject. That works when the empty space is clean and the small thing is placed with care, as in minimalist photography. It fails when the empty space is just leftover ground.
Not sure what makes a good foreground, or how big it should be? Foreground interest goes through the choices one by one.
Edge stretch: keep people away from the corners
A rectilinear wide lens keeps straight lines straight by stretching the image more and more towards the edges. The stretch is directed outward from the centre, so a ball near a corner is drawn as an egg pointing at that corner. This is not the barrel curvature covered under lens distortion, and a lens profile does not remove it. It comes from projecting a very wide view onto a flat sensor, and it is the price of straight lines.
The amount depends only on the angle from the centre of the view. In the extreme corner of a full-frame picture it works out like this:
| Full-frame focal length | How much longer than wide a ball is drawn in the extreme corner |
|---|---|
| 35mm | about 18% |
| 24mm | about 35% |
| 20mm | about 47% |
| 16mm | about 68% |
| 14mm | about 84% |
Rocks, grass and clouds hide this completely. Faces and bodies do not. A head in the corner of a 16mm frame becomes long and slanted, and a person at the side of a group looks much wider than the one in the middle. Halfway from the centre to the side edge of a 16mm frame the stretch is only about 15 percent, so the practical rules are simple:
- Keep faces in the central half of the frame, and never in a corner.
- For groups, step back and use 28 to 35mm instead of squeezing everyone in at 16mm. More arrangements are in group photography tips.
- Keep circles (clocks, plates, wheels, lamps, the sun) away from the corners.
- If a person must be near the edge, turn them so their body faces the camera. The stretch is less obvious on a shape that is already wide.
A second, separate effect is caused by distance. From half a metre, a nose is much closer to the lens than the ears, so it looks large, and a hand reaching towards the camera looks enormous. That happens in the centre of the frame too and is the position effect described above. For people at wide angles, stay at least a metre or so away and treat it as a picture of a person in a place, the approach described in environmental portraits.
Can you tell barrel distortion, edge stretch and perspective apart? Try the lens distortion quiz.
Keep the camera level to control converging verticals
When the back of the camera is vertical, vertical lines in the scene stay vertical and parallel in the picture. Tilt the camera up and they lean inwards towards the top. Tilt it down and they splay outwards. This happens at every focal length, but a wide lens shows more uprights, shows them nearer the edges, and is usually being used close to a tall subject, so the lean is far more obvious.
Use the electronic level in the viewfinder or on the rear screen. It shows two things: roll (the horizon tipping left or right) and pitch (the camera pointing up or down). Zero both. A level camera puts a distant horizon across the exact middle of the frame, which often cuts off the top of a building and shows too much ground. There are five ways to deal with that:
- Move back. More distance fits the subject into the top half of a level frame.
- Raise the camera. From a first-floor window, a bank or a flight of steps opposite, the middle of the building is level with the lens.
- Shoot level and crop. Use a wider focal length, or a vertical frame, keep the camera level, and crop away the surplus foreground afterwards. You lose pixels and keep true verticals.
- Correct it in editing. The upright and perspective controls in most editors straighten the lines, as shown for one editor in the Transform tool guide. The correction stretches the top of the picture and crops the sides, so leave spare room around the subject when you shoot.
- Shift the lens. A tilt-shift lens slides the view upward while the camera stays level.
The alternative is to commit. A slight lean looks like a mistake, and a steep upward view from the foot of a tower looks intended. Point the camera straight up and the uprights stop leaning at all: they all run to the centre, and the picture becomes a pattern. Either keep verticals true or tilt a lot.
In open country there are few straight uprights, so pointing a wide lens down at a foreground is normal practice. Watch trees near the sides, which will lean outwards, and keep the horizon itself flat.
Depth of field and hyperfocal focusing
At the same distance and f-number, a shorter focal length gives much more depth of field. That is what makes the near and far approach possible in one frame. Be careful with the shorthand “wide lenses have more depth of field”, though: if you walk closer to make the subject the same size in the frame, most of that advantage disappears. The quick way to use it is the hyperfocal distance: focus there and everything from half that distance to the horizon is acceptably sharp.
| Full-frame focal length | Hyperfocal distance at f/8 | Sharp from (f/8) | Hyperfocal distance at f/11 | Sharp from (f/11) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14mm | 0.8 m | 0.4 m | 0.6 m | 0.3 m |
| 16mm | 1.1 m | 0.55 m | 0.8 m | 0.4 m |
| 20mm | 1.7 m | 0.85 m | 1.2 m | 0.6 m |
| 24mm | 2.4 m | 1.2 m | 1.8 m | 0.9 m |
| 35mm | 5.1 m | 2.6 m | 3.7 m | 1.9 m |
These figures use the traditional full-frame standard for acceptable sharpness (a 0.03mm circle of confusion). That standard is generous for large prints and high-resolution sensors. For a safety margin, focus a little beyond the listed distance, or use the f/8 distance while shooting at f/11. For other sensor sizes and apertures, use the hyperfocal distance calculator.
In the field, without a distance scale: switch to magnified live view, focus on something at about the listed distance, take the frame, then zoom in on the nearest foreground and on the horizon to check both. If the nearest object is closer than the “sharp from” distance, one frame cannot hold it. Take two or three frames focused at different distances and combine them with focus stacking.
You can practise this without leaving your chair. The challenge below gives you a landscape with rocks close to the lens and asks for the rocks and the horizon both sharp without going past f/16.
Resist f/16 and f/22 as a habit. On most cameras diffraction begins to soften fine detail by f/16 and clearly does by f/22, and at wide angles you rarely need them. The exception is a deliberate sunstar, which needs a small aperture.
Flare, and filters on bulging front elements
Flare
A view of 80 to 100 degrees often includes the sun or sits just beside it. The hood on a wide lens has to be short and cut away at the corners to stay out of the picture, so it gives limited shade. Expect two kinds of lens flare: a haze that lowers contrast, and coloured ghost spots that appear on the opposite side of the frame centre from the light.
- Clean the front element before shooting into the light. Dust, salt and fingerprints glow when backlit, and the deep focus of a wide lens makes marks on the glass more visible.
- Hide part of the sun behind a rock, trunk, roofline or the horizon. Less direct light means weaker ghosts, and at f/11 to f/16 the visible sliver becomes a star. See how to shoot a star-shaped flare.
- Take off any filter you do not need. Each extra glass surface adds reflections.
- When the sun is just outside the frame, shade the lens with a hand or a hat, then check the frame edge to make sure the shade itself is not in the shot.
Filters
Many ultra-wide lenses have a front element that bulges out past the rim, with a fixed hood and no filter thread. They need either a clamp-on holder that takes large square filters or, on some lenses, a small filter slot at the rear. With no filter in front, the exposed glass picks up spray and smears, so check it often.
On wide lenses that do have a thread, two problems come up:
- Dark corners. A thick filter ring, or two filters stacked, can intrude into the corners of the view. Use slim-mount filters and fit one at a time. Check the corners at the widest focal length and at a small aperture, where the shading is most obvious. Optical vignetting is a separate effect that eases when you stop down.
- Uneven polarised skies. A polarizing filter darkens blue sky most strongly at 90 degrees from the sun and hardly at all towards or away from it. A lens wider than about 24mm sees so much sky that one part darkens and the rest does not, leaving a dark band or blotch. Use the polarizer for reflections on water, wet rock and leaves, and turn it down or remove it when a lot of blue sky is in the frame.
Rooms, streets and night skies
Rooms and tight spaces
Rooms, cars, stairwells and boats are places where you cannot step back, so a wide lens is a necessity rather than a style. Most rooms photograph well between 16 and 24mm in full-frame terms. Wider than that makes a room look larger than it is and stretches furniture near the edges, which viewers notice.
- Level the camera in both directions. Door frames, window frames and wall corners must be vertical.
- Set the camera at about chest height. With the camera level, that shows floor and ceiling in similar amounts. Too high shows mostly floor and table tops, and too low shows the undersides of things.
- Shoot either square to a wall, for a calm one-point view, or from a corner or doorway looking diagonally, which shows two walls and more depth.
- Keep large near objects, such as a chair back or the end of a bed, out of the bottom corners where they balloon.
Light and exposure for rooms are covered in interior photography and the real estate photography guide, and dim historic spaces in museum and church photography.
Streets and cities
In streets and squares the wide lens works exactly as it does in a landscape: it needs a near element. Paving patterns, tram lines, a puddle reflection, a railing or an archway overhead give the frame a front; without one, a wide city view is mostly road surface. For a building front, stand opposite its centre, keep the camera level and crop. For height, go to the foot of the building and tilt up boldly. For a skyline across water, a wide lens leaves the buildings as a thin band, so add a strong sky or a reflection, or change to a longer lens.
Among people, 28 to 35mm is the classic street focal length: wide enough to put you inside the scene, close enough that faces near the edge do not stretch badly. Its deep depth of field also makes zone focusing easy. More is in street photography, and viewpoints and timing for buildings in architecture photography.
Night skies
For stars over a landscape, a wide lens is the standard choice. It takes in a large stretch of sky, it pairs with a wide aperture to gather the faint light, and because nothing in the scene is close, even f/1.8 to f/2.8 keeps everything from a few metres away out to the stars acceptably sharp. A shorter focal length also lets a longer exposure pass before the earth’s turning drags the stars into lines, which is why night shooters reach for 14 to 24mm.
Settings, focus on stars and exposure times are in how to photograph stars and astrophotography.
Going wider than 20mm, or wondering what changes when you do? The ultra-wide lens entry covers that end of the range.
When not to use a wide-angle lens
- The subject is far away and you cannot approach. A distant peak, an animal, a boat or a building across a valley will be a speck. Use a longer lens.
- There is no foreground and the space is not clean. A flat field or a car park under a plain sky gives a wide lens nothing to work with, unless the emptiness itself is the picture.
- A tight portrait. From the distance needed to fill a wide frame with a face, the features nearest the lens are enlarged.
- You want the background large or blurred. Both need a longer focal length and more distance.
Common mistakes with wide-angle lenses
Using the lens to fit everything in. The result is many small things and no subject. Fix: choose one near subject, move close to it, and let the rest be background.
Standing too far from the foreground. A rock 3 metres away is a pebble at 16mm. Fix: halve the distance, then halve it again.
Blaming the lens for a big nose or huge feet. That is distance, not focal length. Fix: step back to a metre or more and keep the person near the centre.
Expecting a lens profile to fix stretched corners. Profiles fix barrel curvature and vignetting, not edge stretch. Fix: keep faces and round things out of the corners when you shoot.
A slightly tilted camera. Walls lean a little and the horizon tips. Fix: turn on the electronic level and zero both axes, or tilt decisively.
Focusing on the horizon. The foreground goes soft. Fix: focus at the hyperfocal distance, a metre or two away at these focal lengths, and check both ends of the scene at magnification.
Try this: one object, three distances, one person
Allow 10 minutes. Set your widest focal length (or the 0.5x camera on a phone) and f/8, and find a small object on the ground with open space behind it: a rock, a plant, a bag.
- From standing height, take one frame from 3 metres, one from 1.5 metres and one from 50 centimetres, keeping the object in the lower third each time.
- Repeat the closest frame from knee height.
- Find a doorway or a building corner. Take one frame with the camera level and one tilted up by a small amount.
- Ask someone to stand about 1.5 metres away, first in the centre of the frame, then at the far edge, and take both.
How to judge it: in the first three frames the object should roughly double in height each time you halve the distance while the background stays the same size; if the 50 centimetre frame still looks empty, go closer next time. The knee-height frame should show less of the middle ground. The tilted doorway should lean visibly even though the tilt felt small. The person at the edge should look wider and heavier than in the centre; if you cannot see it, they were not near enough the edge.
Frequently asked questions about wide-angle lenses
What focal length is considered wide-angle?
About 35mm or shorter on a full-frame camera, which is about 23mm on APS-C and 17mm on Micro Four Thirds. Shorter than 24mm on full frame is usually called ultra-wide.
Why do my wide-angle photos look boring?
Because distant subjects are drawn very small and the lower half of the frame is left empty. Move close to a foreground object so that it fills a quarter to a half of the frame, and let the distant scene serve as the background.
Do wide-angle lenses distort faces?
Two things happen. Shapes near the edges and corners are stretched outward by the projection, and anything very close to the lens looks large because of the distance. Keep faces near the centre and at least a metre away and they look normal.
How do I stop buildings leaning backwards?
Keep the back of the camera vertical. If the building no longer fits, move back, shoot from higher up, or shoot level with spare room and crop. Small leans can be corrected with the perspective tools in an editor.
What aperture should I use with a wide-angle lens?
For scenes with a near foreground and a distant background, f/8 to f/11 focused at the hyperfocal distance. Indoors or at night without a tripod, the widest aperture is usable, because depth of field is still deep when nothing is close to the lens.
Why does my lens say 84 degrees when the viewfinder looks narrower?
Lens specifications give the diagonal angle of view, corner to corner. A 24mm lens on full frame covers 84 degrees diagonally but 74 degrees from side to side, which is the width you actually see across a landscape frame.