How to use Super Wide-angle and Wide-angle focal lengths for creative effects with your Canon cameras. Both the super wide-angle and wide-angle lenses are capable of capturing a larger angle-of-view than your own eye. They offer endless opportunities of unique and interesting pictures. You can rely on Canon's super wide-angle and wide-angle lenses to get impressive shots even in tight situations. When it comes to photographing room interiors or architecture, the super wide-angle lenses are hard to beat. Once you have mastered the super wide-angle lenses, a whole new world of photographic opportunities will be yours. And the next generation of lenses to master will be the wide-angle types. Wide-angles are lenses with focal lengths above 20mm and up to 40mm (anything of 41mm till 60mm is considered as a standard focal length for the 35mm format). Like the super wide-angles, wide-angle lenses allow both the background to be in sharp focus as their short focal length makes hand-held shooting easy. Bright aperture settings are ideal for natural lighting conditions, making these lenses the right choice for night scenes or for shooting indoors. Super wide-angle lenses feature a far wider angle-of-view than what the human eye is capable of, thus allowing you to create pictures with interesting visual distortions. Compare the angle-of-view of the human eye, which is around 50-degree, with that of a 20mm super wide-angle lens (94-degree along the diagonal) or a 14mm lens (114-degree). This is like seeing - in one glance - everything framed by your car's windshield from the driver's seat. With the EF 15mm f/2.8 fisheye lens, the diagonal angle-of-view is a full 180-degree - the entire scene in front of your lens. Super wide-angles are lenses with focal lengths from 11mm to 20mm, including full-frame fisheye optics. Any lens having a focal length of 10mm and below is known as the circular fisheye lens since it shows the entire 180-degree diagonal angle-of-view in the 24x36mm film frame. Worm's eye view of Dayabumi Complex (14mm) Dayabumi Complex's compound (14mm) The flowers are bigger than the buildings (20mm) Shooting down gave another exciting angle (20mm) Exaggerated perspective made the dragon larger (20mm) A passage way of Lake Garden shot with 20mm focal length These lenses offer more than just wide viewing angles. Exaggerated perspective foreshortening effects make subjects nearer to the camera appear very large, with a rapid decrease in size as they move further away, as shown in the photos above. A pan-focus effect with everything appearing sharp from foreground to background is thus easily achieved, even when shooting at large apertures. When using such lenses, the angle of the camera, relative to horizontal, also has a significant effect on the resulting image. By tilting the camera up or down just slightly, vertical lines will appear to converge, or taper dramatically. The resulting picture will exhibit a strong perspective distortion. By holding the camera level, a more natural feeling with minimal perspective distortion will result. Used to your advantage, the distortions created by these lenses can help you create more dramatic pictures. The super wide viewing angle means that by simply pointing and shooting, you can create an endless variety of unique images. For the experienced photographer, mastering the super wide-angle lenses means being able to take advantage of their special properties without letting their distinctive characteristics dominate the resulting pictures. << Back to Main . 1 . 2 . 3 .