I picked up the wide angle lens I’ve been thinking of getting last week and went out on Saturday to try it out. This was important because I had heard that this particular lens sometimes had manufacturing quality control issues. So Joe and I went walking around to Queen St West, West Queen West, and the CNE.

I mainly got this lens in preparation for travelling, because I like urban exploring rather than the country sides, I’ve found that the problem mostly is that I can’t fit a scene or building into the picture. I haven’t had a lot of success with panoramas, so I decided to get a wider angle to work with. The wide end, 10mm, is pretty much that widest lens that you can get without going into fisheye territory. It is pretty remarkably because the camera “sees” more than your eye does.

The top picture was taken at 20mm (the “tele” end of lens) which is around the wide end of your normal kit lens. I think your normal digicam has a focal length of 28mm or 35mm so they would look even more cropped. The bottom picture is at 10mm which as you can see captures a much wider perspective than the 20mm.

So my new lens seems great at including lots of stuff into a picture. The drawback is that because it’s so wide, there is a fair bit of distortion; basically lines are no longer straight. It is actually pretty tough to make a picture look real without some Photoshop work, but that’s why I got this lens early to practice with.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: photography