rcarol

So does my Olympus E-M5.

jabra

You can have great results with zero investment by simply stitching shots taken with your existing
lens/lenses. Make sure you overlap 50~60% and use free software like m-soft ICE.

joecichjr Loc: Chicago S. Suburbs, Illinois, USA

Wow I am almost speechless These beauties are utterly magnificent, spectacular

anotherview Loc: California

Ditto.

photogeneralist Loc: Lopez Island Washington State

One downside of wide-angle is that the mountains in the distance may be visually diminished to resemble small pimples on the horizon. If your camera has a panorama sweep/panning setting , Use that with a longer lens instead of a wide angle to capture the grandeur of the mountains. I forget who's addressed this on you tube but their 200 mm 3:1 panoramas were breathtaking. (primarily due to the telephoto perspective being presented like it was a wide angle.) Another approach is stitching together a bunch of portrait formatted originals into a landscape formatted (3:1) is fun. almost the same giddy charge as seeing the image come up in the developer tray in the old days. much more satisfying to see an image that you MADE rather than one you just pressed the shutter button.

David in Dallas Loc: Dallas, Texas, USA

Extreme wide-angle lenses have serious stretching at the edges of the image -- this is due to the geometry of the shot, which attempts to portray the image on a flat surface. Producing a panorama stitched from narrower photos can almost eliminate that effect, producing a more satisfying image that covers the same (or more) scene. I do my landscape panoramas by turning the camera to portrait mode and use my 18-200VR2 lens at 18mm, using about 1/3 overlap. This almost always obtains enough vertical coverage and I can cover as much horizontal scene as I need to. I shoot hand-held, but many people prefer to use a tripod. In the past I used an after-market tool called Autostitch to make do my stitching, but recently I'm mostly been using Lightroom--it has a feature called Edge Fill which is pretty neat.

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

I actually have no desire to correct the verticals, at least in most of the shots. And correcting the verticals results in images that are substantially less wide. For me one of the nice things about wides is the exaggerated perspective, though I know it is not to everyone's taste.

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

For generic wide-view vistas the OP has his 18-55, and indeed 18 is more than wide enough for such shots. One of the first disappointments most people experience using wide lenses for vistas is that the incredible sense of space that one gets sweeping the horizon in person in 3D gets absolutely lost in a flat, rectangular 2D image. You and others are completely right about the futility of trying to capture a flat vista with an ultrawide. That is much better left to stitched panoramas. My point is that a trip to the mountains usually means that you are in the mountains, and when you are close they are quite large. I would say that an UWA is more useful in the mountains than far away from them. I don't have any good sets with a UWA in mountains; the closest is a trip I took to Yosemite a few years ago. Not all of them, by any means, were shot with a UWA, but here are a few for which I am glad I had the lens. These are all shot at 8mm with a Sigma 8-16mm on crop setting on my at-the-time Nikon D800e, and none of them would have worked with an 18mm lens. These UWAs do not weigh a lot or take up a lot of room in the bag, and if one can afford them they are a useful addition to the kit. And we have not even begun to talk about what an UWA can do in city shooting and other situations.

(Download)


(Download)


(Download)


(Download)

David in Dallas Loc: Dallas, Texas, USA

kymarto, those are outstanding photos!

Some folks may not be aware that it is possible to make vertical panoramas, too. And panoramas using 2 or more rows of photos. This one was 13 shots in 2 rows:
Celebrity Theater by David Casteel, on Flickr

and this one was 2 shots one above the other:

Palace composite.jpg by David Casteel, on Flickr

hrblaine

[quote=kymarto].

>I find a wide angle absolutely essential in landscape photography.

Must be why I don't own one, I prefer to shoot discrete objects. I'm a field trialer so I shoot a lot of dogs, but not landscapes with dogs in them. :-) Harry PS My widest lens is an 18-55 which I never use. It lives in a drawer in my desk, came years ago with a camera iirc - I think a 40D which again I never use since I got a 5D.

I do have a 35mm lens on the 5D. I alternate it with a 50 as a normal lens. And I never sell equipment just like I never sell dogs. I may give something away but I would never sell a friend! Not a girlfriend, not a best friend, not a camera or a dog. I've given both cameras and dogs away though, to young people just starting.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Thanks!

WCS

Well done! Some of these shots are 'other worldly' and draw you right in!
Rich color, clear, bright and detailed.
Fun to see!
Thank you for sharing!

camerapapi Loc: Miami, Fl.

If you are buying a wide angle to get more of the landscape you could be very disappointed in your images. Extreme wide angles require care to use them since they expand the foreground while the background recedes. Coming close to the subject is very important.
There are many wide angle lenses in the market. I use the 12-24 f4 AF-S Nikon lens and I am very satisfied with the results I get with it when using my D7000.

My recommendation: learn about using wide angles and then rent one to see if that type of photography is good enough for you. As has already been mentioned the 18 mm side of your 18-55 can yield some nice images.

Jimmy T Loc: Virginia

Your explanation makes so much sense.
Coupled with your beautiful examples, you just saved me a bunch of $$$$.
Smile,
JimmyT Sends

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)