Wide-angle lens

In photography and cinematography, a wide-angle lens refers to a lens whose focal length is substantially smaller than the focal length of a normal lens for a given film plane. This type of lens allows more of the scene to be included in the photograph, which is useful in architectural, interior, and landscape photography where the photographer may not be able to move farther from the scene to photograph it. Another use is where the photographer wishes to emphasize the difference in size or distance between objects in the foreground and the background; nearby objects appear very large and objects at a moderate distance appear small and far away. This exaggeration of relative size can be used to make foreground objects more prominent and striking, while capturing expansive backgrounds. A wide-angle lens is also one that projects a substantially larger than would be typical for a standard design lens of the same focal length. This large image circle enables either large tilt & shift movements with a view camera, or a wide field of view. By convention, in still photography, the normal lens for a particular format has a focal length approximately equal to the length of the diagonal of the image frame or . In cinematography, a lens of roughly twice the diagonal is considered "normal". A lens is considered wide-angle when it covers the angle of view between 64° and 84° which in return translates to a 35–24mm lens in 35mm film format. Longer lenses magnify the subject more, apparently compressing distance and (when focused on the foreground) blurring the background because of their shallower depth of field. Wider lenses tend to magnify the distance between objects while allowing greater depth of field. Another result of using a wide-angle lens is a greater apparent perspective distortion when the camera is not aligned perpendicularly to the subject: parallel lines converge at the same rate as with a normal lens but converge more due to the wider total field.