Hi folks.
Its been a while since I posted here.
But I need expert opinions about what lens should I rent or possibly buy.
I shoot with a nikon D7000, and usually I am carring a 18-200 vrll lens with me.
But soon i will be traveling to escalante petrified state park, kanarraville canyon hiking, and zions nat park, including angels landing hike there.

So. Lots of great landscapes, and since my nikon is crop sensor I am already loosing something of my 18-200 lens. (Like 24-300) Not to mention is a little on the heavy side.

I have been thinking of renting a tokina 11-16 but I have no previous experience with ultra wide lens, and I dont want fish eye effect if its possible.
What you guys recommend for my nikon 7000?

Hi Gene, for some reason the two panos I thought I attached didn't attach, but you make the case better than I did. A great point is that the pano with the longer focal length captures detail an ultra wide angle lens does not. I've found that while foreground objects appear large and sharp, background objects appear small and soft. I think the wide lenses are more suited for group shots, and interiors than they are for landscapes.

On the other hand, that may be an effect that is desired, a vast landscape that rolls out to a soft, indistinct, eternity.

Thanks!

No HDR - just careful exposure and post processing, and using a D800 which has pretty wide dyamic range to begin with.

As far as a lot of work - I stitched them in Lightroom - I selected the 4 or 5 images - 2 secs. Right clicked on one in the selection, revealing the fly out menu and the choice to Photo Merge to Pano. another 2-seconds. Press enter - wait about 10 secs for LR to generate the preview - select the projection you want to use - presss enter - that took another 8-10 secs. Then wait for the pano to be stitched - depending on the image, it can take another 10 secs with 5 images. When it is done, I have a single dng file to continue editing as a raw file, then do some finish editing in Photoshop. Start to finish - for what I posted, which were minimally processed - shadows and highlights, sharpening, color temp, a little cropping, microcontrast adjustment to bring out better clarity, etc was probably less than 5 minutes total.

I've done double row panos that used 16 images, and they took only about a 90 secs to stitch.

This is why I suggest the pano over ultra wide for landscape. Ultrawides have their place, usually in close quarters and when you can crop out the left and right sides and use only the center, un-deformed center of the image. Volume deformation, or if you look at DXO's website, they used to call it volume anamorphosis - is very hard to correct for.

DXO Viewpoint is very good at this but it is not perfect.

http://www.dxo.com/us/photography/community/tutorials/correcting-volume-deformation-dxo-viewpoint

Ultra wide lenses are very specialized tools, generally misunderstood and misused. And generally overused, when better alternatives, at least as far as image quality is concerned, exist.

You probably already have what you need. You just need to explore a better way to use it.

Ultra wide lenses have a very disconcerting and severe "extension distortion" that manifests itself by making things that are in the foreground appear HUGE and things in the distance appear very tiny. It's ok for the occasional pic for a dramatic effect, but to go on a trip and take vista after vista with a really wide lens I think would be a mistake.

Think about the landscape masters - who only painted what they saw. They did not have wide angle lenses - only their eyes. If they wanted to "take in" a wider view - they turned their heads. Their "perspective" did not change, nor did any one of them use a point of view that resembled an ultra wide lens.

In camera terms, the equivalent of turning your head would be to turn the camera - in order to get a wider view. Shoot with the camera in portrait orientation, and overlap each shot 50% with the previous one, to get a better stitch in post processing. Use Lightroom, Photoshop, Panotools, Hugin, or any one of a number of very decent pano stitching tools to make it happen.

I typically use a 45mm lens or longer on a full frame camera to do my landscape panos, even though I have a 14-24 which at the wide end has a field of view equivalent to a 9.33 mm lens on a crop camera. I looked through my catalog and found that I used it about 2% of the time for landscapes. My most used lens is a 45, followed by my 85, 80-200, and 100-300. I have even used a 600mm lens for landscapes. The slight to moderate compression distortion is more "natural" than the extension distortion of a wide or ultra wide lens. Our perception is better at compressing than extending.

The first image was done with a 100mm lens, 4 overlapping shots.

The second was done with a 45mm lens, 5 overlapping shots.

As you can see, the resulting image is quite high resolution. The ones posted here are downsized for posting, but I did add the original dimensions in pixels to the label for each. I usually use a tripod, but when I don't have one I have done panos hand-held with great results.