Captivating Marine Life Portraits with CFWA

In my last column, “The Art of Captivating Macro Portraits,” I touched on some of my techniques to capture macro subjects in a more complementary way. This time around, I will dive into (no pun intended) a particular shooting style known as Close-Focus, Wide-Angle photography – commonly referred to as CFWA.

CFWA is a subdivision of wide-angle photography where the distance between your primary subject and the front of your dome port is often measured in inches rather than feet.

In the past, the go-to lens was a full-frame fisheye for its immense depth of field and minimum focusing distance, down to just shy of touching the port itself. Many of the new wide to ultra-wide (24mm to 10mm) rectilinear, a.k.a. non-fisheye, wide-angle optics made for mirrorless systems can now come as close as a fisheye. However, the one thing they lack is that same degree of forced perspective fisheye lenses are known for. Forced perspective is a technique that uses optical illusion to make objects appear larger or smaller than they actually are. With fisheye lenses, this effect is often pronounced, making close objects appear very large and distant objects very small.

In wide-angle photography, and especially