Wandering around New York City this week and I am trying to turn into a landscape photographer even though:
- I didn’t bring a proper tripod to reduce shake for my exposures, providing a nice crisp image especially with architecture at any exposure.
- Longer exposures at small apertures make people blur out and become essentially invisible, which is great, but see: “no tripod” above.
- I am shooting half like a tourist and half a photog in the run as my wife and I are walking around a lot and have places to go.
- Last: The widest angle lens I have with me opens to 18mm (the Canon kit lens) but is really about a 60% narrower field than that because of the 1.6 digital crop factor* so I can’t stand where I want to get the angle and get the whole building in.
A “pancake lens” while less delicious than an actual pancake, but is a wider angle lens, although a nice 40mm pancake lens on the APS sensor actually crops more than my kit lens! I really need a super wide angle lens or a pricier camera!
Ah well. I’m in NYC, that’s still pretty good.
—David
P.S. You may want to edit your wide angle shots of buildings to get their straight lines back after the distortion of a wide angle lens, too, but that’s for another discussion.
*Digital crop factor: Cameras have been around forever, and lenses build on designs created for film cameras, with a film negative about an inch or so wide. This is considered a Full Frame, and pricier digital cameras offer full-frame sensors, the same size as 35mm film. But there are excellent cameras with APS-C sensors that are cheaper because the sensor is smaller**. So if you take the same picture with a full frame versus the APS-C, your second picture is basically cropped in the camera — not actually by the lens, which passes through the same scene out the back end– but by the smaller sensor that captures the middle of the scene because it doesn’t see the whole back of the lens and loses about 5mm all around. You do see what you get in the viewfinder or LCD screen, but you see more on a full-frame camera. Much better for wide angles.
So my kit camera EOS digital lens marked 18mm-55mm offers a focal length that is equivalent to 29-88mm in the Full Frame aka 35mm format.
** APS-C is 22.2 x 14.8 mm on Canon (23.5-23.7 x 15.6 mm for others), with a Full Frame sensor measuring 36 x 24 mm.
B&H Photo did a nice write-up on wider angle lenses for APS here
wide-angle-lenses-guide so you can explore this further.
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