Hot answers tagged wide-angle
102
Firstly I wouldn't let the recommended retail price dissuade you — the 10-22 can be snapped up for £570 online. To answer the second part of your question:
how can I get the shots I want without having to pay such a large amount of money?
I would look at the non-Canon brand wideangles, such as the Tamron 10-22 f/3.4-4.5 for £337 or the Sigma 10-20 ...
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Wikipedia says lenses below 24mm focal length (in 35mm-equivalent) are considered ultra-wide. Personally I'd say that the field of view becomes ultra-wide when people near the border of the picture start to look significantly wrong.
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I'm not even going to try to compete with Matt's awesome answer for why they're more expensive. But there's a second part of your question that no one seems to have covered: how to get into wide angle photography without the huge up front expense.
Here's a wide angle image I made using a fairly normal zoom lens, several exposures and a piece of software ...
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You lose a ton of resolution when you essentially crop a small portion of your image. Also because of the curvature of the image retained resolution will not be even across the image, which can wreak havoc with apparent sharpness in a print (or even just a web image).
Lastly it's a lot of post processing work you'd have to do for every image you care ...
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Yes.
You can do things with a wide angle that can't be done with photo stitching. This photograph could not have been stitched; whilst I had time to take a few shots, I would never have had the chance to stitch it together.
Also the wide angle has a distortion effect, and this can be used for its specific composition effect and to draw attention to ...
16
"L" lenses aren't always necessarily sharper than their non-L cousins. In fact, some of them are very much softer, often as a consequence of being two or three stops faster than the cheaper lenses, but sometimes just because they're a decade or two older in design.
What you do get with "L" lenses is professional features and the build quality of a light ...
16
The terms are fisheye (circular distortion) and rectilinear (straight edges).
Fisheye lenses are often unfairly branded as "special effect" lenses by some photographers, due to their near ubiquitous use in skateboarding magazines in the 90s, and the ease at which you can create unusual images when trained on nearly any subject.
However fisheyes have sever ...
15
The problem with "expanding horizons" is that by putting more things on a single picture, each single thing is smaller and gets less attention. The only way these shots could work would be by printing them huge so you can really look and explore into the details as well as get the overall impact.
You could try using the lens for group shots in tight space, ...
15
There is overlap between the two terms, as you'll see as you browse the lists of both at LensHero. Basically, they're two different directions from which to approach the problem of narrowing down lens choice, and the site offers both approaches.
A wide angle lens has a specific definition without much flexibility — it's any lens with a wide field of view, ...
14
Broadly speaking wide aperture lenses are easier to design the longer the focal length. The reason that you don't see any 400mm f/1.4 lenses is due to manufacturing difficulties, e.g. keeping dispersion low while producing elements of the size required for such apertures. It's worth restating that the designation f/1.4 means that the size of the aperture ...
13
When you correct the distortion in an image from a fisheye lens, you get undesirable side-effects.
You lose a lot of LOT of diagonal angle of view from cropping, to get a rectangular image out of it. See this first example (yellow indicates the largest usable rectangular area after fisheye to rectilinear conversion). So after correction, you have nowhere ...
13
It is much more complicated than that. There are 85mm prime lenses I'm aware of that exhibit some degree of barrel distortion, and barrel distortion is almost a given at the wide end of a zoom lens no matter how long that wide end is. On the other hand, at the "long" end of the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8, you would have to be shooting brick walls to notice any ...
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On crop sensor cameras such as the 7D, 60D, etc Canon only makes one lens that really fits the bill. The Canon 17-55mm f/2.8 IS is the bread and butter of this range. Many full frame photographers keep a crop sensor camera around just to be able to use a lens with IS in this range, with this aperture, on a zoom. The 24-70mm f/2.8 L is the closest ...
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The two types of lenses you refer to are:
Rectilinear - lenses which produce straight horizontals and verticals across the image
Fisheye - lenses with circular distortion
Rectilinear lenses produce more 'natural' looking images but tend to stretch features towards the edges of the frame, so some subjects, e.g. faces, look odd. But they work well for ...
12
As a general rule of thumb, in the modern DSLR world that is primarily dominated by Canon and Nikon, focal lengths are stated at their "when used on 35mm/full-frame body" values. Focal length is focal length, and doesn't physically change when the imaging medium changes in size, however different sizes of film or sensor do change the effective angle of view ...
12
These are Photoshopped. Each actor is photographed separately or in small groups as appropriate. Then each actor is cut out of their original image and placed in an empty background (either photographed or computer generated).
You can see in some cases that the angle at which the subjects' feet meet the ground isn't quite right (take a look at Christina ...
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While I generally encourage people to consider primes over zooms, you're definitely in the territory here where zooms start to become more plausible. Before getting into that, a recommendation:
Your best bet is probably a DX zoom in the 10-24 range. You'll lose a stop of speed compared to the 14mm prime (most are f/4), but they will be much cheaper (~50%) ...
11
There are a couple posts here already on what filters are available and why you would use them, having been around the block a couple times on filters used for outdoor photography I'll try for an answer from a different angle: what I actually wind up using.
Polarizing filters: Loved them at first, never use them now because they give an unnatural look to ...
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Generally speaking, one must consider the age of the technology when doing fair comparisons. The 18-55 IS is a fairly new lens (replaced the 18-55 non-IS only a couple of years ago), while the 17-40 is an older lens (by itself, though, it does not necessarily mean that a newer lens is better/sharper).
Then, like any mechanical device, there are ...
11
Traditionally, lenses wider than 24mm on full-frame are "ultra-wide". On a smaller-sensor Canon DSLR, a 15mm lens provides that same field of view (16mm on Nikon, Pentax, or Sony; 12mm on Olympus/Panasonic). So on an APS-C camera, a 20mm lens would be "wide" but not "ultra-wide" — but with the increased field of view of full frame, that would fall under ...
11
You would actually get at-par to somewhat better image quality using this lens on your cropped sensor, than using a lens designed for crop sensors, in some aspects:
You would get rid of most of the vignette, as the DX cropped sensor is effectively stopped down 1.23 stops compared to full-frame. (ref. Wikipedia). Thus, from the review link you provided, the ...
11
If there is anything moving in the shot, then there isn't a substitute for a good wide angle lens. In addition, the difference in angle of the lens is going to result in a characteristically different feel from multiple shots at a longer focal length than a wide angle lens would have given on it's own unless you use a specially built mount that can rotate ...
10
I think so, on a full-frame body that is. It really depends on the sensor / crop factor. For most APS-C cameras, your 16mm looks like a 26mm on a full frame... and that is still wide actually :) One of the "bibles" for lens reviews, The Digital Picture, would even call the Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 an ultra-wide angle. I have such lens, and at 16mm it is very ...
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Those two lenses are going to give you significantly different results. The big thing to note is that the fisheye lens is, well, a fisheye. It'll create severely distorted images that can be "straightened" using software but it's going to have a distinct fisheye look.
It doesn't look bad, but it's not what one would usually choose for a ...
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A lot of on-line commentators express disappointment with the 17-40's optics and consistency in particular. And it's smallest, lightest L lens available. It's among the cheapest as well. The L primes cost and weigh more.
The reviews all seem to agree that the 18-55 IS has really good optics for the price.
Some observers of photo tech trends argue that ...
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'End' in this case is just referring to the end of the zoom range available. So zooming in on an 18-55 lens would take you to the 55mm end of the zoom range, which would be the telephoto end, and the 18 mm end of the zoom range would be the wide angle 'end' (although on this lens the telephoto end isn't very telephoto).
So while it may sound like a physical ...
10
The crop will eliminate anything that happens outside of the sensor area. At worst you'll lose the worst of the vignetting, at best you'll lose all of it.
Because the worst of the barrel distortion is right in the middle of the sensor, you're going to be getting all of it. (Edit: Anindo Ghosh correctly points out in his answer that the edges are actually ...
10
You're comparing ultra-wide versus "simply-" wide. It's as if you'd compare a 200mm tele to a 600mm one.
Those 8mm do in fact have a great significance, for example:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brynolf/754640788/
I do think this illustration is a tad exaggerated, but you get the feeling.
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It's all about foreshortening, the effect by which the depth of the scene appears compressed. Different focal lengths just permit you to be different distances from your subject and still give the appropriate framing.
Subject distance is the key value here. If you are a kilometre away from your subject, then the tip of their nose is a kilometre away, as are ...
9
It's something to be aware of, but as long as you're aware of it, you can often still use a polarizer.
I've a 10-22mm UWA and I'm quite happy that I spent the money to get a polarizer for it.
A couple of suggestions for you:
You can often hide the variation across the image by e.g. including clouds in skies for example
When you've rotated your polarizer ...
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