August 2024, Understanding Wide-Angle Distortion

Keeping you informed about happenings at Deliberate Light: photos to browse or buy, photography instruction (see also Digital Photo Academy), and services. Also, my thoughts on a photography subject: this month, Understanding Wide-Angle Distortion. To get these newsletters by email a month before they are posted here, go to the DeliberateLight.com website and click on Newsletter Signup.

NEWS

Upcoming Workshops. I am scheduled to teach the following workshops on September 7 at Bartram’s Garden, Philadelphia. You can sign up here if interested.

· Mastering Your Camera Controls (1.5 hours) – DSLR/Mirrorless/Compact cameras (smartphone tutorial available separately)

· Composition in the Field (3 hours) – walking tour around the venue with instruction and hands-on practice composing photos (bring any camera)

New Photo. Well, actually, a throwback photo from before the pandemic when we used to travel.

The Forever Hallway. Seemed like a metaphor for life, walking down this hallway in the hot humid weather carrying suitcases and not quite arriving. On the other hand, it was a mesmerizing sight. The play of light on the columns receding into the distance and the colorful lines of the carpet pull your eye and you into finding out what is around that corner. We did get there eventually.

(Ponce, PR, 2019)

For a more detailed, enlarged view and to get it printed, see it on my website.

VIEWS

Not that long ago, the subject of wide-angle lenses was restricted to expensive interchangeable lens cameras used by professional or enthusiast photographers. But then high-end cellphone cameras started showing up with wide-angle lenses integrated into the phone and now they are becoming commonplace. You can even buy lens kits to attach to your smartphone, though once you start spending that kind of money on something extra that you have to carry around, you might as well consider a compact camera and enjoy the benefits of a larger sensor.

Be that as it may, it is helpful to understand what effect a wide-angle lens has on your photos when you go to use one.

The common understanding, that wide-angle lenses allow you to get more of a large scene into your pictures, is perfectly true. For example, in this wide-angle shot of a large room in Good Intent (a historic home in Rose Valley), I could never have included the fireplace and the far window in the same shot with a regular standard lens, because there was no way I could back up far enough into a corner to get everything in view.

On the other hand, precisely because wide-angle lenses offer this wide field of view, they can introduce a kind of distortion. It helps to understand this effect so you can avoid problems and even take advantage of the distortion when you want.

Remember this guy from a few months ago?

This photo was shot with a wide-angle lens from up close so that the nose is huge compared to the hind legs. It is not that the lens distorts, per se, but rather that wide-angle lenses allow you to get too close to the subject and it is the getting too close that causes distortion like this. Regular lenses would have this distortion if you could use them to take pictures as close to the subject as this. The very wide field of view allowed by a wide-angle lens means that things farther away appear a lot smaller than things very close up. Imagine holding a coffee cup six inches from your face and next to a window through which you can also see the house across the street next to the cup. The coffee cup looks bigger than the house if the house is far enough away, right? Our brains are adept at instinctively translating knowledge of the size and distance of the coffee cup relative to the house so it does not look weird to us, but to a flat sensor on a camera, the image of the coffee cup is very big compared to the image of the house – hence, distortion.

I find it easiest to think of wide-angle lenses as exaggerating actual distances. The general principle is: things that are close to the camera appear to be bigger and things that are far away from the camera appear to be smaller. When things are relatively the same distance from the camera, their proportions look right but when the differences in distances of things from the camera are relatively large, things get out of proportion, i.e., they distort. So, the nose of our goat friend being a few inches from the camera while the goat’s hind legs are several feet away = distortion.

To illustrate, below on the left is a photo of a piece of furniture taken with a standard 60mm lens from about 20 feet away. Because the furniture and the picture on the wall are about the same relative distance from the camera, everything looks normal (even a foot of extra distance for the farther parts of the table and wall is small relative to the 20 feet away that the camera is). The next photo was taken from more or less the same angle but from about 3 feet away using a 10mm wide-angle lens. Both images were cropped to the left and right sides of the table and to the top corner of the picture above the table and to the foremost leg of the stool below.

60 mm, 20 feet

10mm, 3 feet

10mm 20 feet

The second photo is distorted because now some things are relatively close and some far from the camera – that extra foot of distance is now large compared to the 3 foot distance to the camera. Thedistortion splays the left table leg out to the side and the picture above the table no longer looks like the left side is the same length as the right side. The aspect ratios are noticeably different, also implying distortion.

The third photo is from more-or-less the same angle using the 10mm wide-angle lens from about 20 feet away and cropped to the same edges. I did not get the positioning exactly right, but you get the idea: most of the distortion appears to disappear because things in the frame are all about the same distance away, relatively speaking. The point is that it is not the lens that matters so much as the distance to the subject.

What does this mean practically for shooting with wide-angle lenses? Use them when you have a very large scene to shoot and can’t use a regular lens. But be careful about distance distortion – back away as much as you can to alleviate that effect. On the other hand, if you want to make a subject appear taller, use a wide-angle lens and get close and shoot upward, but again, be careful because things can get odd. Or, if you want comic effect, get very close to the part of the subject you want to exaggerate so parts farther away shrink. Like our goat friend.

I note that telephoto lenses can also distort distances, but in the opposite way: appearing to compress large distances. Can you figure out why the moon looks huge in this telephoto shot?

Carl Finkbeiner

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