Wide-Angle Photography

Wide-Angle Lenses Are Harder Than They Look — Here's How to Stop Fighting Yours
Video Tutorials

Wide-Angle Lenses Are Harder Than They Look — Here's How to Stop Fighting Yours

There’s a specific kind of frustration I remember from my early landscape work: standing in front of something genuinely breathtaking, shooting with the widest lens I owned, and still walking away with photos that felt… flat. Crowded. Like I’d tried to describe an entire novel in a single sentence. I owned a 16-35mm zoom, and for an embarrassingly long stretch, I shot everything at 16mm because I thought wider automatically meant better.

How to Use Layered Foregrounds for Stunning Wide-Angle Landscape Photos (Lessons from Mount Cook)
Video Tutorials

How to Use Layered Foregrounds for Stunning Wide-Angle Landscape Photos (Lessons from Mount Cook)

I spent an entire vacation chasing a single waterfall shot. I kept moving closer to the falls, trying to fill the frame with water and mist, and every image came back looking flat. The problem wasn’t the location. It was that I kept removing myself from the scene, getting closer and closer until there was no sense of scale, no journey for the eye to take. That instinct to walk right up to your subject and shoot is one of the hardest habits to unlearn, and it quietly ruins more landscape photos than almost any technical mistake.