Wide Angle Photography
I'm writing this page because when I first got my camera, I did not understand how to use wide angle lenses to make cool photos. Telephoto lenses are easy and fairly obvious. There is something far away and you want to make it look closer, use a longer focal length lens. From this, one might conclude that the opposite is true of wide angle lenses. They are good for getting more in the picture. More people in a group shot, more scenery, more stuff. Wide angle lenses may allow this, but it rarely leads to good images.
The fun of using wide angle lenses is that they allow for a deep depth of field. In particular if used properly you can achieve photos with pan focus. The easiest way to achieve pan focus is to use the hyperfocal distance. This page describes how to use the hyperfocal distance to achieve pan focus.
Composition
Once you are comfortable with using the hyperfocal distance, you need to start thinking about how to compose you image.
Landscape
Landscape photography is usually used when taking pictures of, well, landscapes. The basic "rules" of composition for landscape photography is to concentrate on having a foreground, a middle ground and a background. The foreground is usually something relatively close to the camera that will quickly capture the eye. Something with interesting detail and that will look large in the image. This is the foreground image, and its basic purpose is to be an obvious place to start looking at the image. Next, the middle ground, should be something further back in the photo. The eye should flow from the foreground object to the middle ground. It does not need to be particularly striking, but it should be distinct from the background to help give the image some sense of depth. Finally the background is, well, everything else. In many landscape images the background image may be more important than the fore or middle ground. However having the fore and middle ground will help pull the viewer into the image.
Note that theses types of images need not be limited to natural settings. Images of cities, streets or other man made objects can also be taken using these rules. These concepts will creates images that tend to draw the viewer into a setting.
Vanishing Point
I'm not sure what these types of photos are actually called, but I call them vanishing point images. These pictures have something that flows from the foreground into the background in a continuous way. The object might be a street, train tracks, a fence or even a beach. The flow of the object draws the eyes from the foreground into the picture. Wide angle lenses can create interesting distortion that exaggerates these effects. Foreground objects may appear very large, and then shrink quickly into the distance. The object does not need to be a single unbroken object, it could be a series of distict objects, such as trees or power lines.