Three Ways to use an Ultra-Wide Angle Lens in Abandonment Photography

Look for a Foreground Element

A good foreground element can set your photographs apart from others. If you are a landscape photographer, you will understand what I mean.

A foreground element can create depth, interest and drama. It can also provide additional context for an image and help with the story. 

In the above image, a pile of rubble emphasizes the fact that this location is an abandoned industrial site.  Helps add depth and tells the story by providing the general context.



Here, the snow-covered tracks connect the building to its purpose as a facility to load train cars, but it also builds in depth and adds interest, and the sense of motion to the image.



Sometimes you can help yourself my moving items around, if possible, but keeping in mind the necessity to be respectful of the site. 

In this case I moved a part of a backbone (or some kind of bone) into the grass in front of the building and then I just go up close – this one required focus stacking so I needed to use a tripod. 



More mundane, but also important. Sometimes the skies aren't great, the light isn't what you hoped for. So, orienting your image towards the ground using a cool foreground element can save a photography outing on a day that would otherwise be a bust. 

Watch out for getting sucked into spending all your time on foreground elements and don’t bother unless they add to the scene. An ugly foreground element doesn’t help.  And a foreground that doesn’t help in telling the story may not be suitable either. 

Using wide angle to emphasizing context

Sometimes photographers argue that you can't use a wide-angle lens without a foreground element. While this argument is debatable, it does tell you a foreground elemen can be really important to make a great photograph.

But with abandonment photography, the larger landscape and environment is often very important to the story. Bringing a wide-angle lens to abandonment photography to capture environmental context can be an interesting approach for a number of reasons, but you need the mindset. 

First, a wide-angle lens can really work well for emphasizing the vastness of the prairies, the grasslands, the open skies.  Is there something unique about environment of the locations you are photographing in that lends itself to the use of a wide-angle lens

In my environment, using a wide-anlge lens to emphazie context often means pointing down and including fields of grasses in the foreground or pointing up and bringing in the broad prairie skies. 

 



 

Just make sure that it remains clear what the subject of the photograph is when using a wide-anlge-lens.


Photographing interiors

Unlike in Europe with their abandoned palaces and castles, we often have small locations for abandonment photography. Old homestead houses used to be built quite small. Often these places are difficult to photograph. 

So if you are inside an abandoned house or building its often nice to have a wide option to get more of the images in focus. Even in a larger space, a wide-angle lens can be used to make an interior room look epic. 

This series of photographs was taken in small rooms, with limited space to set up and position a tripod.  The super wide-angle lens really made this possible.





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