When it comes to landscape and outdoor photography a wide angle lens is by far the most popular tool. Wide angle lenses are great for capturing grand sweeping vistas, getting up close and exaggerating foreground elements, and just an all around great tool for exploring your creative side. But, it’s not all roses, there are certainly a few things you want to be aware of when it comes to shooting and post processing your wide angle images.
Using Too Many Filters
Vignetting caused by the use of multiple filters is a common issue with wide angle photography. This type of vignetting can occur by either using a polarizer or multiple filters. There’s a rather simple resolution for this in Lightroom when the vignette is caused by lens distortion, but when the vignette is caused by filters, well that’s a destructive workflow that cannot easily be resolved. You want to pay close attention to your corners when using multiple filters, if you see a subtle vignette creeping into your frame, try zooming in until the vignette disappears. If you're using a polarizer and see unnatural darkening in a portion of your sky, you'll want to reduce the amount of polarization you're applying and/or zoom in until the vignette is resolved.
Chromatic Aberration
Chromatic aberration is something that occurs with all lenses, but wide angle lenses seem to be a bit more susceptible to this. The dreaded purple and green fringing is most commonly found in the corners of images that are brightly backlit.
The good news is that it’s relatively easy to remove chromatic aberration using Lightroom. There’s two ways to accomplish this, an 'Auto' feature that will automatically locate and remove any chromatic aberration and a 'Manual' option that you can use if the auto method doesn't produce your desired results.
Balancing Light & Color
One of the many benefits of using a wide angle lens is its ability to capture a large scene, but this can also be the cause of multiple issues as well. When photographing a large area the odds are high that you'll capture imbalances from both a light and color perspective. Imbalances in light usually results in an area of brighter exposure versus an area of darker exposure. Read the full blog here.
Mark