Wide angled lenses?

[Donutboy]

Hi everyone,

Well i've taken delivery of my new Canon350d, and i am super pleased with it!! All i need now is a good wide angled lense, has anyone got any ideas....im still all too new at this so all the numbers mean very little!! Any suggestions gratfully received.

Donutboy

[Rob]

Hello Donutboy,

Welcome to TPF!

The magic number you're looking for is the length of the lens, normally expressed in millimetres.

A wide-angle lens will have a focal length less than 28mm (this is a debatable number). So what you're looking for is a lens which is less then that number in length. Most manufacturers should state some stats including this number (usually referred to as "length")

Digital cameras tend to have a magnification factor (when using 35mm film camera lenses) as the sensor is smaller than film. In your case the factor is 1.6x (if the internet is to be relied on - correct me if I'm wrong). Therefore a 20mm lens is actually going to work out at 32mm which isn't "wide" if you're looking at normal Canon lenses - I don't know whether Canon's digital lenses correct for the mag factor.

I can come up with lots of suggestions for a lens, but it really depends on a number of things:

1) How much money do you have for this equipment? (Wider is normally more expensive, as is more light - a smaller f-number)
2) How wide do you want to go? (e.g. 7mm would be very wide, 28mm would be only a bit wider than a standard lens - it would help the good people here for you to say what kind of picture you want to end up with)
3) Do you worry about fish-eye distortion? (do you want the image to look "as is" or to look curvey/strange round the edges, but still very wide?)
4) Do you want to zoom?

Congrats on your purchase, hope you enjoy the forum here.

Rob

[Rob]

Oh, to explain the fish eye effect, this is a picture taken with (I estimate) a 7mm fisheye lens.

http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/courses/arch245/images/fisheye.jpg

This one is taken with a Nikon 16mm fish-eye lens (notice the "straight" lines are very curved):

http://www.video.com.mx/images/NIKON%20ZENITAR%20N%202.8%2016%20FISH-EYE%20LENS%20c.jpg

Compare this one I took myself using a normal 20mm lens (which isn't supposed to be too curvey):

http://www.ukphotographs.com/autogallery/robhesketh/london/lloyds4.jpg

Hopefully this illustrates my point?

Rob

[thebeginning]

if money is tight you might need to look at add-on lenses, like this one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=106845&item=7519753087&rd=1
otherwise you'll need to cough up at least 400 for non-canon wide lenses (tokina, sigma, tamron, etc.) or up to 800 for canon lenses, such as the 10-22mm zoom.

as for the add on lens, I havent tested one or seen a full size image taken with that lens, so i dont know about the optical quality (anyone know anything about these? if so please say so, i've been looking into maybe getting one later to add on to a lens, but have been pretty skeptical).

[tempra]

For a 28mm view on a 350 you need a 17mm lense, the 17-40L is a nice lense but pretty expensive but not as expensive as the 17-35L, you can get the 17-85 EF-S which will work with the 350 - not sure how good this is, but my dad has one and likes it. You can also get Sigma and Tamron ones that are very similar focal lengths for less cash, or indeed the 18-55 EF-S kit lens which has mixed reviews and is cheap as chips.

[Bada Gora]

For the no math option, check out the Canon EF-S series lenses. These are specially made for the dSLR. The lens sits closer to the CMOS sensor and takes the math out of the task of buying a lens. Check out:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=351554&is=USA
just to give you an idea. If you don't want Canon I believe that Sigma also makes lenses specially for the digital SLRs.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Brandon