Camera Lenses Explained: Wide-angle Lens, Ultra Wide Lens, and More
The study of camera lenses (i.e a wide-angle lens) is both technical and artistic and has been left for the professionals so far. With the smartphone trends now shifting toward offering more and more camera lenses, the sophisticated education of this photography tool has become universal.
Thanks mainly to the iPhones and other Android smartphones offering triple-camera or quad-camera setup, everyone can now play with a different lens to capture a shot they envisioned. It often includes a wide-angle lens, an ultra-wide lens, a macro lens and more. To utilize them more, let’s find out what each of these lenses stands for and how it affects an image.
Wide-angle Lens
In photographic terms, a wide-angle lens is a lens that has a substantially smaller focal length than a normal lens for a given film plane. In more technical terms, any lens with an angle of view between 64° to 84° is considered a wide-angle lens.
It eventually translates to a 35-24mm lens in a 35mm film format, and thus, widely used by filmmakers. If you have a lot of things to capture in your photo or scene, this is the lens to use.
Ultra-wide Lens
Ultra-wide angle lens or ultra-wide lens is a lens that covers a shorter focal length than 24mm in full-frame equivalent. It expands the vision to make it more aligned with our eye’s field of view and capture as much as possible. A zoom lens becomes an ultra-wide lens if its focal range is below 24mm at the wide-end.
Macro Camera Lens
The macro camera lens, on the other hand, isn’t directly correlated with the focal length. Rather, it’s a dedicated lens that is optically optimized for handling extremely close focusing distance. They are perfect to take pictures of microscopic objects and subjects.