A Scenic World

I remember when I first started on my lens quest, I didn’t even consider an ultra-wide lens. I thought that 21mm was wide enough for me. It wasn’t until I received the DA 12-24/4 that I started embracing the idea that not all keepers had to have bokeh (yeah, I was quite smitten with being able to have a shallow depth of field for longer than I care to admit).

12mm on an APS-C or cropped sensor isn’t even that wide, really – it’s the equivalent of 18mm on a full-frame camera. But it still offers a full 90° horizontal field of view compared to 67° for the widest view of most kit lenses on a camera with an equivalent sensor (18-55mm).

I’ve had trouble incorporating it into my style, which someone once aptly described as being very much “subject-background-and-nothing-else.” Most wide-angle shots that seem to work best either have

• something really interesting in the foreground, like large rocks on a coastline with the ocean stretched out beyond, or
• feature an eventful sky, which is kind of rare (I usually find it to be all blue or all grey) or
• uniform geometry (think of all the shots you’ve seen of the Vatican’s spiral staircase)

But I’ve worked to find shots that work with this lens, and one of the things I’ve tried to capitalize on is the same sun-flare technique I wrote about with the fisheye lens. It seems you have to be extra careful to have a clean lens, though – while most dust and dirt don’t show up in regular shots, the flare will reveal every last spot on the lens’ surface. It turns out that my lens is filthy, but I didn’t realize that before I took this shot. And as I didn’t bring any cleaning supplies with me on my hasty trip to the US, I’m kind of stuck with what I have at the moment.

Using a tripod while using ultra-wide lenses also seems to be a huge help. Unfortunately, I don’t have a tripod with me at the moment either, so everything I’ve taken recently has either been handheld or set on the ground. A tripod helps in two huge respects. First, it helps to get the horizon straight. While this should always be a priority regardless of which lens you use, it becomes especially important if you want to capitalize on the ultra-wide capacities of the lens. If you have to straighten the horizon in post-processing, you end up losing some of that impact, as most programs crop off parts of the photo to make the horizon straight- and at that point, you might as well have used an 18mm lens.

If you don’t have a tripod, then one of the ways to gain a unique perspective is to set the camera on the ground (pro-tip: do NOT do this on a road that gets a lot of traffic!). But ultra-wides present a problem here too. Depending on the lay of the land, you’re more than likely going to wind up with a photo featuring a huge area of asphalt and very little of your subject. I almost always have a tube of chapstick, so in a pinch, I just slide this under the lens, as far back toward the camera as possible, to get the camera and lens to point up. That’s how I took the following shot:

But I ran into a huge problem when I tried this tactic on a sunny day as we drove back through Georgia. The sun was directly behind the camera, and the lens and camera cast a shadow on the the foreground. Try as I might, I just could not get the lens up high enough to not get its own shadow:

I ended up cropping that bit out before I posted the shot on flickr.

Another thing you have to be aware of when using a super-wide angle lens is the amount of perspective distortion you can get. You can read more about this on wikipedia. For instance, I wanted to take a picture of this abandoned church, but any time you point the camera up, then the base of whatever you shoot is going to look huge and the pinnacle is going to look much smaller than it is in relation to the base. Just taking one step forward or one step back or a step to the left or right changed the resulting image tremendously. In the end, I compromised – I was as close as I could be to get both the steps and the top in the frame, but I wasn’t happy where that bright spot in the sky fell. Ideally  it would have been behind the spire, but that would have meant moving to the right a couple of steps, which would result in the right side of the church looking stretched out. All of this things can be fixed in post-processing if you have the right software, but I’m trying to embrace the eccentricities of the lens.

But the main reason I’ve come to love my 12-24 is because sometimes, there’s just no other lens that can get that once-in-a-lifetime shot you see spreading out before you. I was already dangerously close to trespassing on someone’s property when I took this shot of a tree on a lonely backroad in Georgia – another step or two back, and I’m fairly certain I could have been legally shot by the homeowners. Instead, I was the only one shooting.

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure to go out to Cedar Key  with my good friends J-Fin, c_love82, and santefeegret. I left my wide-angle of choice, the 12-24, at home with the intention of using my oft-neglected fisheye instead. At our very first stop, I took a photo of a dock with the fisheye, and I was suddenly inspired for the rest of the trip.

I ended up using an array of lenses, but in the end, the effect was almost always the same: the sun twinkled in a perfect blue sky, and instead of having a huge blob of white in the top half of the photo, I had a star. It’s a pretty easy trick. Instead of shooting at the largest aperture (f/2.4 or f/2.8 or thereabouts), I stopped down the lens a LOT – in some cases, all the way to f/22. It makes for some slow shutter speeds, but there was enough light to manage to handhold.

With the fisheye, I generally just kept it at 10mm and chose an autofocus point in the bottom right-hand corner. I manually exposed so that the sun wouldn’t be over-exposed. The rest of the photo looked very dark in the original but I made sure to shoot at the lowest ISO my camera offers (ISO 100) and then I dodged all the dark sections (the water and the sand) in post-processing:

“At the End of the World”
Pentax K200D, DA 10-17 @ 10mm, f/11, 1/160th shutter, ISO 100

This next shot was also taken with the fisheye, but because I was more concerned with the sandy forefront, the frame was taken up by a lot more of the “dark” stuff than the light and with getting maximum depth of field (hard to do without a tripod, which I didn’t have). Hence the huge difference you’ll see in the camera settings:

“Distortion”
Pentax K200D, DA 10-17 @ 10mm, f/20, 1/40th shutter, ISO 100

I took an all-bokeh version of the same scene using a much longer lens. For this one, I manually-metered the scene again and manually-focused until the image looked the right amount of out-of-focus. The DA 70 produces fanastic bokeh at its largest aperture, and I was more concerned with the reflections off the water than with with the sun in this one, but you can see how it’s just an amorphous white blob when the aperture isn’t stopped down. The shutter maxed out at 1/4000th, the fastest it can go:

“Bokeh Run”
Pentax K200D, DA 70mm, f/2.4, 1/4000th shutter, ISO 100

Compare that to the sun in the photo below, which was taken in manual mode with the FA 31 at an aperture of f/11:

“Last Shack Standing”
Pentax K200D, FA 31mm, f/11, 1/3200th shutter, ISO 100 

The DA 70mm, stopped down to f/22, made an interesting flare in this photo. Unlike the other shots which were basically focused to infinity, this one is of a roof that was no more than 6 feet away.

“Roof”
Pentax K200D, DA 70mm, f/22, 1/320th shutter, ISO 200

And finally, one last shot of the stunning light we were party to yesterday. J-Fin has the DA 55-300, and she was generous enough to let me use it for the majority of the day. I found it much lighter than I expected it to be, especially for its size.  It seemed to focus quickly (especially compared to my D-FA 100mm Macro that I usually use for my long shots!). This is a shot of the light reflecting off the water around the piers taken at 190mm:

“Rain of Fire”
Pentax K200D, DA 55-300 @ 190mm, f/22, 1/2500th, ISO 100

When I got my first DSLR, I knew I wanted to invest in prime lenses. In fact, the Pentax primes were one of the big reasons (in small packages!) that I bought the brand. The camera came with the kit lens, but I immediately sold that and got the FA 43/1.9. I loved and love this lens, but with an impending trip to Spain and Morocco, I figured I needed  a wide-angle lens for landscapes and a longer lens for portraits, so I bought into the conventional thinking and purchased the DA 21/3.2 for the wide shots and the longer DA 70/2.4 for the portraits.

I took only those three lenses with me on my three-week trip and took a couple thousand shots. I quickly discovered two things: first, that if I want to go wide, I want to go ultra-wide, and second, that there is no one that’s better for landscapes than another. The reason…and I know this is ground-breaking…but the reason is that every landscape is different. You might be relatively close to some scenes you want to shoot. Others might be miles away. Some might have interesting foreground elements. Others might just have piles of dirt in front of you. You can’t just automatically assume when you’re standing on the apex of a mountain that the most interesting view is one that takes in all that space. Chances are you might be better off with a 400mm lens in that case (although I wouldn’t want to carry that all the way up the mountain!). Likewise, when you’re taking a photo of that mountain, you might be tempted to take in all that grandeur with a super-wide, but often the majesty would be better served with something like 135mm (case in point: this incredible photo from the inimitable Terry Alford).

When you decide to be a primarily-prime shooter, you really have to make tough decisions before you leave the house, and unfortunately you never really know what landscapes you’re going to run across and what you’ll need. Luckily it seems like you can get good landscape shots with almost any focal length if you give yourself time to find a shot that works with the lens. Conversely, when it just doesn’t work, you have to just move on and try to live with no regrets. Or you could just buy a superzoom.

Here’s a collection of some landscapes I’ve done with varying focal lengths, from widest-to-longest:

@ 12mm with the DA 12-24/4

@ 16mm (with the DA* 16-50/2.8):

@ 21mm (with the DA 21/3.2):

@ 31mm (with the FA 31/1.8):

@ 43mm (with the FA 43/1.9):

@ 70mm (with the DA 70/2.4):

@ 77mm (with the FA 77/1.8):

@ 100m (with the D-FA 100mm Macro – yes, a macro lens):