page_title: Ultra wide angle lens
section_title: Characteristics
hierarchical_section_title: Ultra wide angle lens / Characteristics
caption_attribution_description: English: How changing the shooting point along with changing of focal length affects photograph composition. One subject remains the same size, while the other changes size.
context_page_description: An ultra wide-angle lens is a lens whose focal length is shorter than the short side of film or sensor.
  Thus the term denotes a different range of lenses, relative to the size of the sensor in the camera in question.
  For 1" any 9mm or shorter is considered ultra wide angle.
  For 4/3" any 10mm or shorter lens is considered ultra wide angle.
  For APS-C any lens shorter than 15 mm.
  For 35mm film or full-frame sensor any lens shorter than 24 mm
  For 6x4.5 cm any lens shorter than 41 mm
  For 6x6 cm and 6x7 cm any lens shorter than 56 mm
context_section_description: 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 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. For example, buildings appear to be falling backwards much more severely when the camera is pointed upward from ground level than they would if photographed with a normal lens at the same distance from the subject, because more of the subject building is visible in the wide-angle shot.
  Because different lenses generally require a different camera–subject distance to preserve the size of a subject, changing the angle of view can indirectly distort perspective, changing the apparent relative size of the subject and foreground.
caption: How focal length affects perspective: 18 mm (ultra wide-angle), 34 mm (wide-angle), and 55 mm (normal lens) at identical field size achieved by different camera-subject distances. Notice that the shorter the focal length and the wider the angle of view, perspective distortion and size differences change.
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