The floor of Death Valley is a vast evaporating dish covering 200 square miles. Here it is crusted with lumpy salt pinnacles, the residue of a lake that evaporated 2,000 years ago. In the summer, the ground temperature here approaches 200 degrees (F). The point of this picture is its vast flat scale. Only a wideangle lens can do justice to a subject this wide. Using a camera with a 28mm lens, I moved as close as I could to the salt pinnacles in the foreground without losing a sense of the vast place itself. This demonstrates a great strength of wideangle photography. A true wideangle lens of 24mm or 28mm will allow you to get as close as you want to the subject to stress detail, yet still retain enough sweeping content to provide an idea of scale.