Photography News | Issue 42 | absolutephoto.com
Technique 30
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Get creativewith your wide lenses Four simple projects to shoot with your wide-angle lens.
PART 3
1 Shoot vertical for impact
We just told you how to get rid of converging vertical lines if you want to. Well now how about using them to your advantage? With the right subject shot in the right way you can use those converging lines to lead the eye into the pic, accentuating height or depth. The trick here is to find a location or subject where there are enough lines to balance each side of the frame, or where there’s enough detail to balance the composition. Otherwise the effect will seem lopsided. In the latter case, it comes back to filling the frame as much as possible, because those converging lines will draw the eye to something so strongly, there’d better be something for it to rest on. In the example images, simply shooting wide and angling up at the tree in a horizontal framing doesn’t do it justice; it looks unbalanced and unsteady. But getting in closer I was able to fill the lower right of the frame with the trunk, forming an anchor, so that the eye follows the branches up and through to the bright leaves.
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The majority of landscape pictures rely on strong foreground to anchor the composition, and draw the eye into the frame – and wide-angle lenses really help with this. Because of the way they enlarge close subjects via a wide field-of-view and can focus closer than other lenses, you can get big, detailed foregrounds with ease. To really enlarge the foreground, especially when it’s small or you want to make the most of fine details, you’ll need to focus as closely as possible, so first check your wide-angle lens’s minimum focusing distance. For example, the Sigma 20mm f/1.4 Art lens used here has a minimum of just under 28cm. Next set your camera on a tripod and compose so that the foreground is very close to the minimum distance, but not inside it, or it won’t be fully sharp. Now use the AF, or manually focus on the foreground. Finally, before shooting, switch to aperture-priority mode (A or Av) and set a high f/number like f/14 or f/16 to hold as much of the scene in focus as possible. You may find that focusing so close affects sharpness in the distance. So after the first shot, take pictures focused on the middle ground, then background. If required, you can then merge the separate exposure in Photoshop to ensure sharpness throughout the scene. 2 Exaggerate the foreground
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