The truth is, it can take years of practise to get good at wide-angle photography. Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this content, perhaps you might also like my ebook “ Film in a Digital Age.” Its 180 pages packed with knowledge and dive deep into all sorts of topics to help you master your film technique.Wide-angle photography is difficult. I know rather often that when I’m working up close I tend to need about 1 extra stop of light to get the correct exposure and that has never let me down. Or, you can do what I do and make a best guess. I’ve heard there are even apps to do it for you. If you are a perfectionist you can do these calculations in the field. Just somewhere around 8 seconds would work fine. So if you metered 4 seconds, you would multiply that by 2.19 to get a true exposure time of 8.76 seconds. In this situation the exposure compensation would be 2.19, this is the number you multiply your exposure time by to get correct exposure. Take the bellows draw (how far out the lens is) and divide it by the focal length of the lens. If you don’t have a measuring tool, make your best guess! You can use a mm scale if your camera has one or measure. The bellows compensation formula is rather simple, but you need to know how far out your lens is to be exact. This isn’t a big deal focusing on something 6 feet away, but is critical when working on something just a foot or two from the lens. Expect to spend quite a bit of time getting these scenes just right, it’s always quite a challenge perfecting focus and tiny camera movements greatly change the composition.ĭon’t forget to add bellows compensation for these images! Any time the lens is cranked out further than it’s designed focal length, the aperture becomes effectively smaller and requires compensation. It allows me to work at a comfortable height while achieving focus and the composition I desire. When I’m working near the car and the subject is flat against the ground like the leaves shown above, the 210mm is my go-to lens. Even a 90mm would have felt a bit tight in this valley. Below you can see an example of a mountain valley that needed all that width to work with both the peaks and the reflection. I’ve found that the 75mm lens works incredibly well for most of these valleys, and in the off chance it turns out to be a little too wide that’s no problem! With such big film it’s ok to crop a little. It’s also important to save some weight so I don’t want to slog 5 lenses into the backcountry. Most of the time I go backpacking it’s into mountain valleys where peaks tower over my head. A 150mm lens on 6x17 would have a similar horizontal view to a 110mm lens on 4x5. Equivalents get a little weird with panoramic formats, but there is a crop factor of roughly 1.4 between using half a sheet of 4x5 vs a 6x17 back. Secondly, your focal length needs will become different. This is because the back has to be wider than the rear of the camera, which blocks the path of light on longer lenses. For those wanting to use a 6x17 back on their 4x5 camera, remember two things: First, due to the designs of the backs it’s often not possible to use lenses longer than 150mm or perhaps 180mm without vignette. This cropped view captured the most interesting portion of the clouds without being so wide as to include needless and distracting elements.
The best part of it is that both people are right! There’s something to be said for the “zoom with your feet” mentality as well as the idea that you should have the right tool for every job.Ībove is an example of a slighter longer view at 135mm on the open prairie. Others may find themselves continually changing lenses and adapting to different scenes with a huge arsenal of glass. Some people may develop a style where they gravitate towards wide angles or telephotos and mostly use just one lens. This is one of those artistic choices that really changes the outcome of the image. There is no set-in-stone answer to what makes the “right” focal length for a given scene.
This has led to a lot of people asking me “what focal length did you use for this image?” This becomes a little more difficult to pick out when a wide angle lens is 75mm compared to 24mm and distortion almost unnoticeable. When viewing an image shot on a DSLR of a flower bush pressed close to the lens and a grand mountain scene in the background, it’s often easy to tell that an extreme wide-angle lens was used. What I’ve noticed with 4x5 is that unlike smaller formats, it’s a lot harder to pick out what focal length a photographer used when taking an image. Whether you’re just starting out with large format photography or looking for the next lens to expand your shooting style, choosing the proper focal length for the scene makes a big difference.
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