This wide angle shot was taken by Flickr-user rady one ツ.

2. Going Wide Gets You Far
Try this experiment: Put your face very close to someone else’s (this tends to spook strangers). Notice how much bigger the person’s nose appears when you’re very close. Perspective distortion? Not really. It’s the natural perspective that occurs when your eye (or optic) is focused on something much closer than the mid- or background. This exaggerated scale isn’t really determined by focal length but by closeness—you can enlarge the size of your subject’s nose with a close-focusing normal lens, too.

Wide-angle lenses let you focus on a very close object and still get lots of the background in the picture. Experienced nature shooters exploit this by using foreground objects—a shrub, a boulder, a fallen tree—to anchor the composition. With very wide-angle lenses, it creates a sense of great depth, almost an illusion of 3D.

TIP: To maximize the near-far covering power of your wide-angle, shoot with the camera vertical. This way you can get everything from the grass beneath the cow, to the trees and sky behind her.