Another critical advantage of wideangle photography is tremendous depth of field. This simply means that with a wideangle focal length, you can get everything in focus from near to far. This came in handy, for example, when I made this shot of my hosts in Lijiang, pbase photographers Alister and Allie Benn http://www.pbase.com/alibenn studying the menu at a local restaurant. I was able to get reasonably legible focus on everything from Alister’s budding beard to the patient waitresses expression and beyond. Usually, the closer we get to the subject with our lens, the smaller the area of sharp focus becomes. But with a wideangle (even a moderate wideangle such as this 35mm focal length) lens, we can get very close and still get plenty of focus depth in our images