Using a Wide Angle Lens: The Foreground Mistake That’s Wrecking Your Seascapes

A 12-24mm wide angle lens can make a calm shoreline look chaotic if you do not control the foreground. It can also hand you leading lines, texture, and scale in a single frame, if you work it with intention.

Coming to you from Michael Shainblum, this practical video follows Shainblum on the central California coast as he builds compositions around sea foam, reflections, and a distant sea stack. You watch him commit to a very wide view, then keep adjusting as the tide lays down new patterns and wipes them away. He leans hard on foreground weight, keeping the sky present but not dominant, which is a useful reminder when clouds look dramatic but the ground is doing more interesting work. He keeps settings simple and repeatable, including f/16, ISO 100, and shutter speeds long enough to give waves some motion without turning the whole scene into blur. You also see the real constraint of ultra wide: small shifts in where you stand can rescue a frame or ruin it.

The video then pivots away from the obvious “big scene” approach and starts looking for smaller, stranger frames hiding in the same location. Shainblum swaps to a longer focal length and aims straight down at bubble patterns, working around 200mm with stabilization on and a handheld shutter speed around 1/400 s. That “double the focal length” habit is treated as a baseline, not a law, which is how you should treat it when the subject is jittery and you are moving with it. He talks about harsh light being risky for wide angle scenes, then shows how that same hard light can become an advantage when it hits wet sand and reflective patches at the right angle. If you usually chase water flow and ignore everything else, this section should bother you in a good way.

Where the video gets more honest is when it leaves the beach and heads to coastal dunes, because the problems are different and less romantic. Footprints linger, tracks happen, people cut through the frame, and the dunes can feel smaller than you want them to look. Shainblum shares a specific moment of getting frustrated years ago, then points out how repeating “failed” locations can quietly turn them into strengths, which is a useful mindset when a place refuses to give you a clean composition. He starts again with the same 12-24mm wide angle lens, gets low, and tries to use ripples as a foreground ramp into the background dunes, then admits the first result feels cluttered. The fix is not a new trick, it is movement: he walks a few feet, changes height, and watches how the foreground patterns gain or lose authority depending on stance and angle.

You also get a grounded look at decision-making when the light is dropping and you need to stay mobile. Shainblum keeps f/16 in play for depth, but still uses focus stacking when he is close to the sand, sometimes aiming to keep it to two frames when possible. He bumps ISO to around 500 in the dunes and works at about 1/125 s so he can stay handheld and respond quickly as shadows zigzag and soften. He mentions that you could do the same scene on a tripod with different settings, but he is prioritizing speed over theoretical cleanliness as the window closes. Later frames simplify even more, sometimes dropping the foreground entirely to isolate softer dunes, wet texture, storm cloud placement, and color contrast, with at least one twilight composition shot around 12mm that needs a deeper focus stack because the camera is less than a foot off the ground. The video includes a set of high-contrast black-and-white treatments that change how you read foam, muck, and dune texture, and it asks you to spend time with interpretation rather than treating every landscape as a postcard. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Shainblum.

And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out our latest tutorial, "Photographing the World: Japan II - Discovering Hidden Gems with Elia Locardi!”