At the moment I’m trying to learn how to properly use my 14mm Panasonic Lumix 1:2.5 lens. So the first thing I did after arriving at work was to take a photo with it.
A 14mm lens together with a (Micro-) Four Thirds sensor has about the same angle of view as a 28mm lens on a 35mm Kleinbild (film or digital) camera. It’s a very versatile focal length which lets you crop to your heart’s content – everything from square format to really wide goes. I was thinking of my brother Willi who’s a bit more interested in movies, so I cropped this first image of the day into a 1:2.4 cinema format:
Even with a 12MP camera like my little “Pen”, you’ll still end up with something like a 6K image, which is more than three times as big as what they sell us as HDTV. Very nice, tho you can’t of course record a movie like this except when using anamorphic lenses which I don’t have. Anyway, even as a still image, a crop like this could be useful for some landscape photos.
During my lunch break I walked with that same camera and lens again, and the following photos are all uncropped (except maybe a very slight cropping which happens automatically when you correct a slight tilt/rotation of your camera). So here are some more:
I had to try one in “portrait” orientation of course:
And I remember that I took photos of that bridge with my 50mm macro lens once, so I also wanted to try the wide angle:
14 (or 28) millimeter is wide for me, because I feel much more at home with a lens between 85 and 105mm (on film). So I tried to avoid the usual “in your face” traps with too big foregrounds or too many “falling” lines, but I also didn’t want to produce boring “just get it all into the frame” shots. There are those who master 20mm or even wider (on film), but I still have to practise with this one a bit, until I become able to preview and to anticipate an image before even taking the camera to the eye.
Technical info: all photos taken with the Olympus E-PL1 camera and the already mentioned 14mm Panasonic lens. The first one in the garage was at f/5.6 and all others at f/8. Minimal and quick “standard” corrections only. Not profiled, which means Olympus colours.
Thanks for reading.
I really like the photo with the railroad tracks. The lines of the tracks lead you right to the railroad car coupler in the foreground. You really get a tremendous amount of depth-of-field with that wide angle lens. Nice job!
Thanks Gregg!
Wide angles take a while to “get” — or at least they did for me. Now I use them all the time but more for the perspective they give rather than “getting everything in” although that has its place too.
If you look at my shots you’ll see a lot of the same thing: wide to ultrawide lens used close to the subject of the photo to make it “loom large” with the background receding in size and therefore in interest. It’s yet another way to practice exclusion (that all important photographic concept) to help the viewer really see your subject and not get too diverted by non essentials.
I see you doing that too in some of these and it’s a useful — if perhaps overused in my case — tool.
It’s nice to come back to your blog after an absence and see you still looking at what things do — and what you can do with them.
Yes wide angles are for the masters
I’m just reading a book about light painting (not with a moved light during exposure but with multiple overlaid shots) by Eric Curry, and he’s one of those masters who don’t make their use of wide angle all too obvious. Still reading it, but I’m very impressed so far.
Next and already ordered book will be the latest one from Neil van Niekerk, which falls more into “my” category – portraits, and natural light.
Thanks again for your nice comment. I guess I just never want to stop learning.