There’s a specific frustration I keep running into on coastal shoots. I find a strong foreground element, a piece of weathered rock or a tide pool with real texture, and I want to connect it to a dramatic sky without sacrificing sharpness at either end of the frame. A 16mm or 24mm gets me close but not quite there. The compression still feels slightly safe. What I actually need is to get uncomfortable, to push the lens right into the scene and let the geometry do the heavy lifting.

That’s exactly what William Patino works through in this tutorial, filmed along the tropical coast of Queensland, Australia with a 10mm ultra-wide. It’s one of the more practical demonstrations I’ve seen of how this focal length actually behaves in the field, not in theory, but with real water, real rock, and real decisions happening in real time.

Why 10mm Changes the Geometry of the Frame

At 10mm on an APS-C sensor, or roughly 16mm full-frame equivalent, the angle of view is wide enough that foreground elements appear dramatically larger relative to the background. That’s not just a stylistic choice. It’s a compositional tool. When you place a rock, a cluster of coral, or a patch of tide-pool texture in the lower third of the frame and drop your camera low, that element becomes an anchor that pulls the viewer’s eye into the scene and then carries it toward the horizon.

What Patino demonstrates is that the lens rewards proximity. You’re not standing back and shooting wide. You’re getting your camera a foot or less from the foreground subject, often with the lens pointed slightly downward, and letting the natural distortion stretch the perspective in a way that feels expansive rather than gimmicky. The key is making that foreground element genuinely interesting. A bland rock close up is still a bland rock. But textured coral or patterned wet sand shot at that distance becomes almost abstract, and the wide angle turns it into a visual entry point.

The Focus Stack: Why One Frame Isn’t Enough

At 10mm and at close focusing distances, depth of field is still a real challenge. You can stop down to f/16 or f/22, but you start trading sharpness for diffraction. Patino’s approach here is to focus stack, typically two frames, one focused on the foreground element and one focused on the midground or infinity.

The process in the field is straightforward. Lock your camera on a tripod, set your exposure manually so both frames are identical, and take your first shot focused on the near foreground, then refocus toward the horizon for the second. The key is not moving the camera between frames. Any shift in position creates alignment problems in post that become time-consuming to fix, especially with moving water in the frame.

In Photoshop, you load both images as layers, select both, and run Edit > Auto-Align Layers, then Edit > Auto-Blend Layers with Stack Images selected. Photoshop builds a luminosity-based mask between the two focus points and renders a composite that holds sharpness from the near foreground all the way to the background. For most coastal scenes it works cleanly on the first attempt. Where it struggles is with heavy wave movement between frames, which creates ghosting along the water’s edge. Patino addresses this by either timing the shots to match water position as closely as possible, or by manually painting through the blend mask afterward to choose which layer’s water reads best.

Reading the Light on an Unfamiliar Coast

One thing Patino does well in this video is show how he scouts and adapts. Queensland’s tropical light behaves differently than the golden-hour light I work with in the American West. The sun rises fast and goes harsh quickly. The window is short and the color is warm but not forgiving for long.

His approach is to identify two or three foreground candidates before the light arrives, so that when the sky does something interesting, he’s already positioned and not scrambling. That habit is worth borrowing regardless of where you shoot. I’ve started doing a version of this on every coastal shoot, walking the low-tide line the evening before and marking the spots I want to return to in the morning. It sounds obvious but it changes how calm you feel when the light actually lands.

Where I’d Push This Differently

Patino shoots in relatively clean, open conditions. The ultra-wide works beautifully there. Where I’ve found this approach gets harder is in cluttered or heavily vegetated environments, like the forest edges along the Oregon coast, where the wide angle tends to pull in distracting elements from the periphery that compress oddly. In those situations I’ll often switch to a more deliberate two-shot panoramic stitch rather than a single 10mm frame, which gives me some of the same depth-of-field flexibility through focus stacking while letting me control the edges of the frame more precisely.

The other adjustment I make is to slow down even more than the technique requires. I learned early in my career, partly from a mentor who had zero patience for photographers who rushed, that the scene will tell you where to put the camera if you stand in it long enough. The ultra-wide punishes impatience more than most focal lengths because the composition is so sensitive to camera height and distance. A two-inch adjustment changes everything.

The Frame Lives or Dies at the Foreground

The single most important thing Patino demonstrates, and the thing worth carrying into your next shoot, is this: at 10mm the foreground isn’t decoration. It’s the foundation. Get it right and the rest of the frame organizes itself around it.

Watch the full tutorial to see exactly how Patino positions himself in the scene, times his shots against the wave movement, and moves through the Photoshop blend. The visual demonstration of the camera-to-subject distance alone is worth the watch.