When a Wide Angle Lens Is a Mistake

A wide angle lens is a tempting choice at White Sands National Park, and it’s also an easy way to come home with files that look flatter than what you saw. The video tackles that gap between what feels dramatic in person and what actually reads well in a frame.

Coming to you from Brent Hall, this great video goes to a place where wide angles can betray you fast. Hall starts by calling out the most common mistake: standing at normal eye height and pointing straight ahead because the scene looks amazing. In dunes, that approach usually turns into a flat picture with no sense of shape, no pull, and no real subject. He also talks about footprints and how calm conditions can leave the surface crowded with visual noise, which forces you to walk farther and be pickier about where you set up. You hear the tradeoff in real time: energy and time disappear quickly, and your standards have to stay high anyway.

Hall then gets specific about light direction, and this is where the lesson starts to bite. If you shoot dunes with the sun behind you, you can erase texture and make the sand look like blank paper, even when the place itself feels wild. He shifts to side light and back light to bring out shadows and edges, then shows how quickly the scene gains structure once the surface has depth. He trims the sky down until it’s just a sliver, not because “skies are bad,” but because an empty sky steals attention without giving anything back. He also uses a ridge line as the anchor, letting that curve do the heavy lifting instead of hoping the wide angle will magically create drama. It’s a simple change that’s easy to skip when you’re tired and hot.

The most useful part is how he talks about camera height without making it sound like a rule. Staying low can give you strong foreground texture, but it also changes what needs to be sharp, and that can push you into focus stacking when you’d rather keep moving. He explains the problem in plain terms: the closer you put the lens to the foreground, the more you have to manage what falls out of focus. He also hints at a different trap: going too low can make you lose the bigger shapes you came for, because the foreground starts to dominate and everything else collapses. Then he flips the usual complaint about wide angle distortion and uses it on purpose, pulling edges in and out of the frame to exaggerate lines instead of pretending the lens is “neutral.”

Once he’s back at the computer, he shows how those choices play out across real frames, including shots where the sky gets cropped because it’s doing nothing. He also shows a version of the same idea with different timing, where waiting changes the entire feel even though the subject barely moved. You see why he reaches for a sunstar when the sky is blank, and you also see that it’s not a cheat code, because it still has to fit the composition and the direction of light. Then he pivots into the comparison most people avoid because it complicates gear choices: wide angle versus longer focal lengths in dunes. He talks about how dunes get harder to read as you go wider, and why longer lenses can simplify the scene into clean layers and repeating shapes, including examples made with a Canon RF 70-200mm and a few panoramic approaches that lean on compression instead of coverage. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Hall.