Enjoying Ultra-Wide Lenses

Do you shoot with ultra-wide lenses? I do… and often too, since I love the dramatic perspectives one can get! The headline shot above was taken inside the “new” city hall of Hanover, Germany (built in 1913), with my Laowa 9mm ultra-wide. By definition, an ultra-wide-angle lens is wider than 24mm on a full-frame camera, wider than 16mm on an APS-C camera, wider than 12mm on a Micro-4/3 camera and lastly, wider than 30mm on a medium format camera like a GFX 100S II… just to cover the most common digital formats. In my own APS-C Fujifilm kit, I currently own the Fujinon XF 8mm f/3.5 R WR and XF 14mm f/2.8 R as my two ultra-wide lenses, and they do see a lot of use. Not too long ago, I had a Laowa Zero-D 9mm f/2.8 as my widest lens and before that, the Fujinon XF 10-24mm f/4 R OIS, the original version. Looking at my Lightroom library from my 2024 trip to the US Southwest, out of the 2,200 or so shots, over 500 were taken with my 8mm and 14mm lenses.

For the full gallery of ultra-wide samples that accompanies this posting: Enjoying Ultra-Wide Lenses

Note that you can click on any image below in this posting, and a larger version will open in a new tab or window.

One very useful characteristic of using an ultra-wide lens is that when stopped down, you can get a tremendously deep depth of field as in the above photo, where everything from a few feet in front of the camera to the rock pile in the background and beyond is tack sharp. The above shot only needed f/8 to achieve that, which means that diffraction is not yet softening the entire image. Had I used a longer lens, I would have needed to stop down further to get the same deep depth of field, with the risk of limiting my absolute sharpness due to small aperture induced diffraction softness, or the risk of having some of the foreground or background a touch soft if not stopped down far enough.

The above shot of Navajo Arch in Arches National Park was taken while crouched low and backed against the sandstone wall with my Fujinon 8mm lens, a perspective that cannot be achieved with anything but an ultra-wide due to the relatively small size of the arch and the inability to get further away and still capture this same field of view.

Looking at my 2022 trip to Germany, it was a similar ratio… combining my Laowa 9mm and Fujinon 14mm lenses, about a quarter of my shots on that trip were taken with my two ultra wide lenses.

The above photo was taken in a tiny little chapel at the Herzberg castle ruins. The chapel is very narrow but the ultra-wide lens allowed me to capture all the hand-carved tablets on the left wall, even while framing the shot towards the right to capture lots of coloured sunlight streaming in through the stained glass windows. As you can see, when an ultra-wide lens is shot level, not tilted up or down, you can avoid dramatic perspective distortion without sloped vertical lines. On the other hand, if you tilt your camera up, the ultra-wide perspective distortion becomes very apparent!

Ultra-wide lenses are great at capturing expansive interiors, as well as tight interior or exterior shots where there is simply no room to back up and get the shot with a lens that has a narrower field of view.

If you have dramatic skies, then an ultra-wide can add to the drama too…

You’ve seen me use the 9mm often in the above photos, but just how much wider is it than the 14mm? Quite a bit! Below is a comparison, first the 14mm, then the 9mm, both shot from almost the same spot (I was about two feet to the right for the second shot)…

For another example, with links right into the gallery, there is this 14mm shot and from the same position, this 9mm shot.

You may be wondering what the “Zero-D” refers to in the name of the Laowa 9mm lens? It basically means “zero barrel distortion.” Often times, wide angle lenses can have quite a bit of barrel distortion, unlike the 9mm Laowa. These days, most cameras correct jpeg files for barrel distortion and embed lens metadata in the shot too, so your raw converter will usually take care of the distortion correction behind the scenes as well. You might never know the lens you shoot with has significant distortion since images are usually corrected automatically. However, correcting barrel distortion comes at a cost: when you un-distort an image and stretch out the corners, that can negatively impact the sharpness of your image at the edges and in the corners. The Laowa 9mm has basically zero distortion and thus none of the shots in the gallery required any digital correction. This makes images from the Laowa impressively sharp corner to corner! Many Fujifilm prime lenses are also entirely free from barrel distortion and are fully corrected optically, and the 14mm is one of those too. Other wide angle prime lenses that are basically free from any distortion in Fujifilm’s lineup are the 16mm f/1.4, the 18mm f/1.4, the 23mm f/2 and the first generation 23mm f/1.4.

On the other hand, my new Fujinon 8mm f/3.5 does actually have barrel distortion that requires digital correction, so the extreme corners are actually not quite as sharp as the smaller and less expensive Laowa 9mm. I demonstrated the distortion characteristics in my review of the Fujinon 8mm. That said, the lens is superb overall and even after correction, the corners are still quite sharp, especially when processing the raw file in Capture One Pro, since unlike Adobe Lightroom, it actually has a function to correct for sharpness falloff in the corners of an image.

I will say that creating an optically superb ultra-wide angle lens is not an easy task, especially back in the days of digital SLRS (and film SLRs!), due to the relatively long distance between the back element of a lens and the sensor itself (the flange distance), necessitated by having that pesky 45 degree angle mirror which flips up out of the way when taking a photo. Optical designs were challenging but these days with mirrorless cameras, lens mounts have increased in diameter to accommodate larger glass and flange distances have decreased tremendously, allowing for newer and more optimized optical designs. Modern ultra-wide lenses are extremely good compared to what we had 15 years ago! As an example, Nikon’s new Z-mount mirrorless 14-24mm f/2.8 ultra-wide zoom is smaller, lighter and optically superior to the the older F-mount DSLR version, which was still a very good lens back in the day.

Another aspect of an ultra-wide lens that is important, apart from its optical correction for distortion, is how resistant it might be to lens flare. With an ultra-wide, especially when shooting landscapes, you might often find the sun in your field of view, and without good anti-reflection coatings, you could suffer from a lot of lens flare. First, we have an example of not-so-good coatings on a preproduction Laowa 17mm lens for G-mount, taken with a Fujifilm GFX 50R. I am quite sure that the production version of the 17mm would perform much better, since my 9mm Laowa was quite resistant to flare…

Note the general loss of contrast in the shadows and the many red flare artifacts, especially near the bottom left edge.

Next, an example of extremely good anti-reflection coating performance, this shot taken with my Fujinon XF 8mm f/3.5 R WR…

While I love using my ultra-wide lenses, there are some situations where such a vast field of view might not be appropriate. For example, if you need a headshot, using a lens that wide means you will be very very close to your subject, and that will introduce some (ahem) minor distortions which some might not find flattering…?

Ultra-wide lenses will, by nature, stretch and distort your subject. For example, put a round wall-clock in the exact centre of your frame and no matter what lens you shoot with, it stays round. Put that clock in one corner of your frame and with a longer lens, for example a 100mm, that clock will still look more or less round. However, put that clock face in the corner of a shot taken with an ultra-wide, and it will stretch into an oval. The wider the lens, the more stretched the corners will be. This is not a lens defect, rather a simple result of optics and perspective. In fact, if you make a large print of an ultra-wide shot that shows such perspective distortions, move yourself very close to the print and peer up at the corner from the centre of the frame, then if you are at the “correct” viewing distance, that stretched clock will actually look round again. Optimal viewing distances to avoid distortion vary based on the angle of view of the photo you took and can actually be calculated.

To be fair, there can be subtle differences in how much a lens will distort in that way based on the exact optical design. Take two 14mm lenses from different manufacturers, or event comparing 14mm on a zoom with a 14mm prime from the same company, if you overlay the images, you might see slight variations in distortion. Again, ultimately most of the distortion you will see is simply due to perspective, but lens design can slightly contribute to the effect as well.

Due to such distortion, you want to avoid putting people near the edges or corners of an ultra-wide photo, or anything that might look disturbing when it is distorted, since most of the time, we step back and view the print as a whole and don’t get close enough to avoid such distortions. Of course, one can also have fun with perspective distortion, as in the photo of me above. Jason took the photo with the camera less than a foot from my face, so things that are even slightly closer, like my normally stubby nose and my forehead, seem unusually larger. I tilted my head towards the camera slightly to get that caricature effect and my nose is starting to get a Pinocchio stretch to it… and no, I am not lying about all of this perspective stuff!

Anyway, if you do not have an ultra-wide lens in your arsenal, you can always rent something from us! Ultra-wide lenses are not for everyone and can be challenging to shoot with at times, so trying one out before buying is highly recommended. For Fujifilm X-system, we have the 10-24mm zoom and the 14mm prime. For the GFX, we have the 23mm prime (18mm equivalent in full-frame terms). For Canon RF-mount, we have the 15-35mm f/2.8L and for EF mount, we have a huge range of options from zooms as wide as the 11-24mm f/4L full-frame, primes like the 14mm or the 17mm T-SE and many more. For Nikon Z-mount, we have the 14-24mm f/2.8 and the 14-30mm f/4 and for F-mount, we have the 14mm, 19mm PC-E and 20mm primes, as well as 14-24mm f/2.8 and 16-35mm f/4 zoom lenses. For Sony, we have the Sony/Zeiss 16-35mm f/4.

For an extensive gallery with many ultra-wide samples, see: Enjoying Ultra-Wide Lenses