A wide angle lens is a camera lens with a wider angle of view and a shorter focal length than a lens used to produce a normal image size by that camera.
Function
A wide angle lens allows a photographer to keep an image sharp from a few feet away. It can extend an image's periphery, making it ideal for photographing a tight indoor space or a large group of people. It's also great for shooting landscapes with large sections of the sky and the ground.
Features
The key feature of a wide angle lens is a short focal length, or the measure of how strongly it focuses light. This gives an image a large depth of field, with the foreground and the background in focus at the same time.
Types
Depending on size, lenses are classified as wide angle lenses, super wide angle lenses and fisheye lenses. Fisheye lenses have angles of view ranging up to 180 degrees, producing images that look curved or as if they were captured in a bubble.
Size
For the 35 mm format, a standard wide angle lens is 28 or 24 mm. A super wide angle lens ranges from 20 to 14 mm. A fisheye lens is about 6 to 8 mm.
Considerations
Because of their wide view, wide angle lenses throw off perspective. They're not good for shooting realistic close-ups or portraits because they can magnify and distort items at the edge of the image.
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