Some wide-ish angle photos..

 

                    This barber shop was snapped with a micro-four-thirds Panasonic GX1 and a 7mm lens, making

                         that equivalent to the view seen by a 14mm super-wide-angle on a ‘full-frame’ camera.

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                    This backlit hotel floor (don’t worry, the watermarked name will disappear from noticeability

                     when you’ve seen a few of these pics) was shot with a PEN-F micro-four-thirds camera with a 7mm lens,

                     making this pic also equivalent to the view seen by a 14mm lens on a ‘full-frame’ camera.

                    This helicopter ride down the River Thames was also shot with a PEN-F micro-four-thirds with a

                     7mm lens, making this one also equivalent to the view seen by a 14mm lens on ‘full-frame’.

                    This was shot with a full-frame Leica M9 with a Leica 16-18-21mm lens at 16mm. Nothing looks especially ‘stretched’,

                     but it gives a much wider view - with more in the frame - than any ‘normal’ lens would give. One of the reasons why

                     things aren’t stretched is because the camera was held dead level ..but that’s cut off the feet at the bottom of the photo.

                    This was shot with a built-in zoom lens at its widest 4mm setting on a little Panasonic Lumix TZ10 camera with

                    a 1/2.3" (6.08 x 4.56 mm) sensor. 4mm is about half the length of the diagonal of that sensor, so it’s about

                     equivalent to using a 21mm to 24mm lens on a ‘full-frame’ sensor. (And yes, it’s that souk in Muscat, Oman

                     which William Fagan recently wrote about.)


                     [See https://mmcalc.com to easily find approximate equivalent focal lengths on ANY size sensor!]


                    I like this for all its different shapes - diagonals, arches, a circle, uprights, different colours, solid panels and

                     filigree, oh, and one human ascending the stairs.

                    This was shot with a full-frame Leica M9 and a Leica 16-18-21mm lens. The EXIF file says “21mm”, but this looks to me

                     more like 16mm. I probably just set the lens to its 16mm position, without going thro’ the hassle of resetting

                     the focal length in the camera’s menus. This gives, again, a much wider view than any ‘normal’ lens would give, showing

                     a comparison between the quiet, sedentary person reading, and the uncertainty and windiness or expansiveness

                     of being out at sea.

                    Another pilot - this time an airship pilot - shot with a full-frame Leica M9 and a Leica 16-18-21mm lens at 16mm.

                    Again; nothing looks especially ‘stretched’ or distorted, but - again - it gives a much wider view, with more in the frame

                    than any ‘normal’ lens could give. There’s very little tell-tale giveaway distortion here.

                    An open-air rooftop restaurant in Mexico City. Shot with a 7mm lens on an Olympus E-M5 micro-four-thirds camera.

                    That makes it equivalent to using a 14mm lens on a ‘full-frame’ camera. Nothing else would have delivered such an

                     all-encompassing view ..except for a lens which was even wider still. Although the can of “7-Up” in the lower foreground

                     looks slightly stretched, everything else looks pretty normal for a 14mm equivalent.

                    This, I think, is absolutely beautiful. It was shot with a 4mm lens (a built-in 12x zoom) on a Casio ZR-1000 pocket

                     camera which has a 1/2.3” sensor (giving about a 5.6x ‘crop’), so that was roughly equivalent to something like a

                     22mm to 24mm lens on a ‘full-frame’ camera. A single dolphin, out at sea, with only distant land and sky beyond.

                    Here’s the Zeppelin which that pilot was skippering, three pictures above. This was shot with a 16mm lens on a ‘full-frame’

                     M9. Yup, the whole airship isn’t in the frame, but I wanted to highlight the single-wheel undercarriage beneath

                     the passenger ‘gondola’, just taking off (Oh, and there’s one more teeny wheel at the tail.) I wanted to show its massive

                     size rising up out of the frame. And yes, the horizon’s not level, but that makes a nice “>”-shape with the gigantic body,

                     and makes the passenger gondola pretty much level, instead.

                    Shot with an Olympus E-M5 micro-four-thirds camera and a 7-14mm lens set at 14mm - equivalent to 28mm on a

                     ‘full-frame’ camera.  Mad, crazy, weird, huh? ..I particularly like the woman and girl being in step with each other,

                     both having long black hair, both wearing a T-shirt, jeans and sport shoes, as if one is going to turn into the other.

                    Shot with an absolutely tiny Pentax Q-S1 SLR-lookalike camera (with a 1/1.7” sensor) and a 3mm wide-angle lens, equivalent to

                     a 14mm lens on a ‘full-frame’ camera, but easily pocketable. This was a trip on a tourist boat on Amsterdam’s canals.

                    There’s a bit of stretching closer to the camera, and towards the edges, but I think that gives it extra impact. (That’s a map

                    of the Amsterdam waterways printed on the plastic table at the bottom of the frame.)

                    This was a mini-lab in Nagasaki, Japan - and to encourage people to use film, this chap rented out a huge assortment

                     of classic film cameras:  so you chose your camera, bought a film - or six - took the camera away for a day

                     or several, brought back your camera and film(s) and the developing and printing was done within an hour.

                     7mm lens on an Olympus E-M1, equivalent to 14mm on a ‘full-frame’ sensor.

                     Ice and water in a glass on a multicoloured table. 8mm on a Sony RX-10 (“one inch”) camera, roughly equivalent to

                     a 21mm to 24mm lens on a ‘full-frame’ sensor ..though it’s unlikely that I could have got this close to fill the frame with a

                     normal 21mm or 24mm lens ..it just wouldn’t have focused this close - another advantage of a small-sensor camera.

                     Well, if it isn’t Elaine and Ivor of Red Dot (or red jacket?) Cameras in London, taken with a 16mm lens on a Leica M10.

                     (Leica 16-18-21mm lens set to 16mm.) You can see that it’s a very wide-angle lens, as the verticals

                     towards the edges of the picture are ‘stretched’ diagonally ..but that’s just because the camera was tilted DOWN

                     to include Ivor and the desk in front of him as well as the pictures on the wall.

                     If I’d squatted down, or sat in a chair, and then held the camera absolutely level you’d have seen no tilted lines at all.

                    The wide-angle lens simply emphasises the TILT of the camera - if it is tilted.

                     Taken with a 7mm lens (..well, a 7-14mm zoom, at its widest 7mm setting..) on an Olympus E-M1 micro-four-thirds

                     camera. Here, the tilting and ‘stretching’ really adds dynamism to the photo (..on the Tokyo subway). Here we have

                     one man walking horizontally across the picture, and another coming straight towards us while he looks us in the eye!


                     That, and the slight blur of feet and faces (at 1/40th of a second), really gives a sense of rush. A narrower lens, of course,

                     wouldn’t have caught so much of the scene, and so many people hurrying to work.

Note that some of these photos were taken with ‘full-frame’ cameras with a sensor size of 1½ inches x 1 inch (36mm x 24mm) and others were taken with an assortment of different sensor sizes ..some as small as 1/2.3 of an inch (6mm x 4.5mm, which is thirty-two times smaller than ‘full-frame’) and some with a 1/1.7” sensor (7.6mm x 5.7mm, or about a twentieth the size of ‘full-frame’) ..although without the captions underneath, would you really have known which are which? ✱ The size of the sensor does not affect the sharpness of the photo ..that’s down to the quality of each lens ! Note that larger sensors will generally give better shots in low light ..but that, too, depends on how many pixels have been squeezed onto each sensor, and a lower megapixel count will usually give less “grainy” pictures in low light than a higher pixel count on a same-sized sensor.