Although I use my ultra-wide-angle lenses a lot for landscape shots, I think that’s a waste of time in most photos, because the composition becomes too polluted and distracting. Hence, ultra-wide-angle lenses should be used a lot for getting closer to the subject.
Take the shot above at the Louvre, for instance. I was about 4” from the pyramid. The subject fills the frame, creating a strong composition. I also pointed the camera down, to take advantage of another ultra-wide property: radical plane distortion. A shot with the camera parallel to the ground would have looked very boring. That covers the “getting closer” part.
Let’s talk a bit about landscape shots. Or, in my case here, cityscape. Getting all in is a bad habit. Take for instance my first photo of the Tour Eiffel. I did it at 16mm using the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 a few hours ago.
Looks pretty, right? But it also looks empty. The composition is not perfect, as the subject could have been closer and filled the frame – “getting all in” doesn’t work. In fact, I took this photo only because I loved the light in this scene and I didn’t have any other lens to use. It’s better to shoot it than not shoot it at all, right?
Now let’s take a look at another photo taken at the same place about 5 years ago.
Much better, don’t you think so? The tower fills the frame, it feels closer and there’s more detail to the relevant parts of the scene. This was taken using a cheap Canon Powershot A85 point-and-shoot camera. Three mega pixels. Yup… and IMHO, this photo beats the previous one by far, even though there’s a $1500 price difference between the cameras. So, this is an example on how not to use an ultra-wide lens.
Now, when the subject is the landscape (or “the background”) itself, ultra-wides usually work well. Let’s take a look at this shot taken at the New Croton Reservoir in Westchester last month.
See the difference? Now there isn’t a “real” subject to fill the frame, so the scene doesn’t look busy at all. A clean composition that makes the viewer concentrate on the beautiful reflections and the contrasts between the red hill and the shinny blue reservoir.
So, the message here is: when using ultra-wides, be careful to not include any distracting elements to the scene. They only weaken the composition and make your photo worse.