Making things look spacious

OK so now that we've worked out that wide-angle lenses make things look spacious we need to put on our thinking caps and think of times when you might want to do that.

Hands up those of you who would like to holiday on a beach that looks really small and crowded with no room to move. Not many I'm guessing.

Beaches need to look like there's lots of room to run and play. Remember how we talked about how wide angle lenses make things in the distance look small and far away?

If you look at the people in the ocean they look very small and far away. Our beach looks very wide and spacious but not from left to right. It looks spacious from foreground to background. The water looks a long way away giving an overall sense of space. The way we all imagine a beach should look.

But you'll notice that the foreground isn't all beach. Whenever you use a wide-angle lens it is really, really important that you get up nice and close to something and put it in the foreground. That way your viewer will look at the foreground object and then follow it into the frame, looking around the whole picture.

Many people make the mistake of putting their wide-angle lenses on and only having objects in the middle and backgrounds, both of which are really small and insignificant. The foreground is where all the action happens with a wide-angle lens so you need to make sure that you always get up nice and close to something.