Landscape Photography With an Insanely Wide Lens

Ultra-wide lenses can make a forest scene feel bigger than it looks in real life, but they also punish lazy framing. If you want depth, clean lines, and a clear subject when the light is low, the choices you make within a few feet of the camera start doing most of the work.

Coming to you from William Patino, this hands-on video follows Patino on a sunset walk as he puts the Laowa 10mm f/2.8 Zero-D FF through its first real shoot in the forest. The headline is simple: 10mm is not “a bit wider,” it changes what counts as foreground and what gets ignored. When you move from 12mm to 10mm, you stop thinking in steps and start thinking in inches. That sounds dramatic until you watch how quickly stray sticks, bright leaves, and empty patches of ground sneak into the edges. Patino’s approach pushes you to treat the bottom third of the frame like a project, not an afterthought.

Patino also shows a practical way to shoot toward the light without turning the scene into a flat silhouette. He sets up with the sun hitting the lens, but keeps most of the foreground in shade so the eye has somewhere to travel before it reaches the bright area. With a lens this wide, the near objects get loud fast, so he looks for a foreground anchor, then asks what it points to in the background. You see him use ferns as the lead-in, then build the shot around a backlit group of trees instead of letting the frame turn into a random “pretty forest” sweep. If you tend to come home with files that feel spacious but empty, this section will feel uncomfortably familiar.

The video gets more useful when Patino starts talking about working distance and focus choices at 10mm. He demonstrates just how close you can get to the foreground while still keeping a meaningful background, and why being “kind of close” usually fails with ultra wide angle lenses. He also walks through a clean focusing strategy, aiming around a third of the way into the scene instead of snapping to the far background or the nearest leaf. You’ll hear him compare apertures you might default to, like f/11 and f/16, versus using f/8 or f/10 when the lens and scene allow it. He checks sharpness across the frame, including corners, and he is blunt about what he sees when he zooms in on the file.

Where the video gets interesting is the tension between creativity and restraint. Patino hunts for “natural windows” in roots, branches, moss, and hanging growth, then admits that a frame is not a photo unless there’s something worth framing behind it. That’s a hard lesson in forests, where the background often turns into mid-tone clutter the second you widen out. He also addresses distortion and corner behavior, and how that changes where you place important details. Later, he gets into the real-world gear decision: prime sharpness and better corners versus the flexibility of a zoom you already trust, plus the less glamorous reasons you sometimes add a lens to the bag. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Patino.