Wide Angle on a FF

[Wayne Els]

My next purchase will probably be one of these, most likely the 17-40 so in a random splurge here are some thoughts. Opinions and other options not considered are most welcome. Oh, primarily for landscapes.

17-40L F4 a good lens that offers a reasonable compromise for the money. For me the 16-35L F2.8 is waay overpriced when compared to it for no really discernible benefit. so with that starting point what other options are there?

Sigma 20mm F1.6 EX DG, gets poor reviews so think I will discount it.
Zeiss 18 or 21mm Distagons, Great build and image quality at a price with only manual focus.
Tokina 18-28mm F2.8 AT-X Pro. Seems ok, heavy, no filters but a lot of these filters don't fit or are going to cost a lot.
Tokina 17-35mm F4 AT-X Pro. Meant to be good but is the same price as the 17-40 so may as well have the red ring.
Canon 8-15mm F4L Fisheye. I'd love to have a play with one and think you could get some great shots but it's far from "mainstream". The barrel distortion is too much for anything other than "effect" type shots so it couldn't be a regular lens.
Canon 20mm F2.8. Soft wide open and in the corners closed down. Better to pay the extra for the L and it's adjustable range. The point of primes is sharpness (and cost and size) a bit pointless if it fails on this.
Canon 14mm F2.8L. Sounds amazing, downside is the cost.
Canon 17mm TS-E F4L. The lens I think I want more than any other! A combination of IQ and endless options to play creatively. Just expensive, manual focus and scared I'd damage the front glass are the obvious downsides.

[MX5]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

The 17-40L is a good choice ... some might say the corners of images are soft ... but others say they are acceptable. Any doubts borrow one and try it out. The 8-15L I would also like ... but not sure I would get the best out of it.

[Wayne Els]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

Wow, thanks for the early morning response! Re the 17-40, I'd seen that and it's pretty much what John said but I've seen some good shots taken with them. There doesn't seem to be a lot o other contenders, hence the question.

[DrJon]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

This is a repost of my reply in the other thread, to save people looking for it. I'll do a longer one when I get a chance, also I plan on a review of the 8-15 (short version - amazingly sharp, but if you want to straighten the images it can take quite a while in post, plus you need either Photoshop or something that eats PS plugins, you will also need exposure tweaking on lots of shots as so much illumination range is in the frame, bonus purple bits mean raw shooting is usually a must, a full-size 15mm shot is available here (click 'original size'): http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/51526563 but you probably need to be registered to download it - also it's a test shot not an artistic one).

---------------------- From: http://www.eos-magazine-forum.com/sh...0-v-EF-S-15-85 ----------------------

BTW I'm not sure what the best wide-angle on a 6D is, on a crop body the 10-22 is a no-brainer for going really wide and the 15-85 for a wide and general purpose lens is again an easy one. On FF there's the 24-x fy (where x = 70 or 105, y = 2.8 or 4) lenses that go quite wide, are somewhat heavy and perform well. Wider than that it gets tricky. I've never been happy with the price/performance of the 17-40 on FF (the corners are very soft wide-open and that's only f4, so it wouldn't suit me, although it's really quite nice at f5.6 and down where it is a bit of a bargain) or the 16-35 II which again isn't that good wide-open (although at least that's f2.8, but the corners are amazingly dark at the wide end - down 2.8 stops) and the 17-40 is better than it when they're both stopped down. I skipped those entirely and have the 14/2.8 and 8-15/f4, the former being sharp (plus having amazingly low distortion) and the later amazingly sharp (with bonus purple bits). Of course there's a lot more to lens performance than sharpness, but it doesn't hurt as it's one of a few things you can't add back in later. Frankly most modern mid/upper range lenses are pretty good and will give great results, even the kit lenses tend to do sharp pretty well... it's a good time to be a photographer, on any budget.

John

(Edit) P.S. err, not so good financially to be a Pro, for most was better a decade ago, but for kit it's good for all.

[colin C]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

I use the 17 - 40mm on FF.

While I accept Jon's point about being soft in the corners at f4, you really do have to pull out the lens testing charts, or pixel peep to a huge degree to find it. In normal practice, you would never know. I have found a little barrel distortion, as you would with most wide angles, but it is easy to correct in DPP.

Plus I primarily use this lens for landscape at f8 or smaller.

Plus my action is toward the centre of the shot and that's where people would (should) be looking. If I take such a boring, tedious shot, that viewers feel compelled to take out their magnifying glass to check the corners, then I need to take up a new hobby.

I bought the 17 - 40mm after being disappointed with the overall softness of the early 16 - 35mm f2.8 and the 17 - 40mm delivered performance that I was happy with. I accept that the 16 - 35mm f2.8 MKII is marginally better, but I don't use wide angles enough to make the investment.

[briansquibb]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

I use the 17-40 as well and find it perfectly adequate. On the other hand I prefer the 40/f2.8 and my TS-25mm for normal use - the zoom lens only is of benefit in tighter conditions - else I just walk backwards and forwards to make the find adjustment.

[DrJon]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

Brian - I'm guessing you walk along less Canals, Rivers and Lakes than I do :-)
(I'll be walking across Tower bridge later today, traffic on one side and a bit of a drop on the other. I think I'll stand in the one spot...)

Although I'll add the 8-15 isn't strictly a zoom, it's an 8 and a 15 in one lens.

On the 17-40 I'm still not convinced at the wide end, wide-open the Canon MTF graph reads 0.15 (taking the highest measurement, 1.0 is perfect) at the edge. The 24-70 reads 0.88 wide open, which is a stop more. The 16-35 reads 0.3 on a comparable measurement (f2.8 again). The Fisheye gets 0.88 at 15mm and the edge (most of the way it's 0.98 or higher, at 8mm it's basically 1.0 all the way, before you stop it down, um, after too).

[DrJon]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

BTW here's a Panorama I made from 4 stitched shots with the 8-15mm at 8mm... (I'm thinking of trying 12mm to see how much the resolution improves, not that the lens is better there, it just uses more of the sensor.)

http://www.viewat.org/?i=en&id_aut=7366&id_pn=22647&sec=pn

Don't forget to look up and down. (Plus zoom in/out.)
John

[MX5]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

That's a cracker Sir

[jk224]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

Very impressive

[colin C]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

I am amazed.

[Guesty]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

Dr Jon, how do I go about producing something like that?

[hhcanon]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

Dr Jon, how do I go about producing something like that?

Have a lot of spare time? family and 'full' time job, just waiting to retire some day lol

[DrJon]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

Well, you need a nice day with a blue sky and some nice white clouds, so basically only one or two opportunities per decade in the UK...

More seriously...

Equipment: Canon 5DmkII + 8-15mm fisheye lens, a length of cotton and a metal bolt, plus a ColourChecker Passport (err, or just choose Sunny as the White balance, or 5600K).

I tied a piece of cotton around the front end of the lens (as the nodal point is somewhere around there) and tied a weight to the other end of the cotton (a metal bolt). I picked my location and used the cotton+bolt to keep the same position and height to take 4 photographs at 90 degree intervals. I tilted the camera up 10 degrees for the 1st and 3rd shots and down 10 degrees for the other two. (Okay, more "a bit" than exactly any number of degrees.) I used manual white balance (set from a white-balance-suitable 18% grey card - the exposure ones aren't all spectrally neutral so may not be good for white balance, actually a ColorChecker passport in my case) plus used manual exposure at f8 (I just metered around me and picked a good compromise). I tried to set the focus correctly (allegedly just past the 1m mark) and left that in manual too.

I then processed the raw files in DXO Optics Pro 8 to remove the bonus purple colour fringing the lens gives you (BTW that isn't ticked by default) and to improve the dynamic range (it's important to use the same settings for all four shots). Obviously you could use Lightroom or DPP, just lose the purple stuff...

I used PtGui Pro, with the free SmartBlend plugin, for the next steps. I chose SmartBlend as the blender and Lanczos16 as the interpolator. I ran all the tabs in Advanced mode. I also ticked all the viewpoint boxes in the optimiser (well, except the top one, which doesn't apply).

Next up I loaded the four images into PtGui Pro, and...
(1) Adjusted the crop to the best I could (hint - zoom in as the zoomed-out view isn't that accurate).
(2) Added a number of vertical control point pairs to help the software sort out what is what (select the same image for left and right in the control point editor)
(3) Masked out my shadow and assorted other stuff I didn't want in the shot. This stage is important as you have effectively two shots for every location, so you can choose, artistically, what's in the final photo.
Oh, and just use Red masks (plus Clear to remove Red bits), the Green is a disaster with SmartBlend.
(4) Aligned the images then ran the optimiser.
(5) Went back to #3 a few times to sort out iffy stitching and duplicate people (I didn't have any partial people, but them too if you get them) also for any bits low down where shadow removal has left no data.
(6) Created 95% quality JPG and MOV panoramas. BTW the MOVs look amazing on a retina iPad using the iPano app (£1.99).
(7) Probably tweaked a few more things in masking and so went back to #3 again. For example on the first try one of the overhead supports didn't stitch exactly, so I masked out that bit to make it blend it somewhere better.

Spent a while evaluating on-line Panorama publishing sites before deciding I liked viewat.org the most (BTW 360cities.net came second).

If you want to view the JPEG Panorama on a Windows system I can recommend the free FSPViewer (available in 32 and 64 bit versions). I don't have a Mac but would suggest panoglview as a good place to start.

Hope that is reasonably comprehensive while not putting people to sleep.

Changes for next time:
(1) The cotton gets tangled, try something that doesn't take 5 minutes to untangle.
(2) The bolt isn't heavy enough, it was very windy.
(3) The bolt is too hard, I banged it into the lens at one point, use something softer!
(4) Work hard to minimise the amount of my shadow in the pic (i.e. stand back and shoot without looking through the viewfinder).
(5) I'll try the lens at 12mm or so as then it uses more of the sensor and has the possibility of creating a higher resolution final image. For example the above setup gives a 7172 x 3586 panorama, at 12mm it would be 10572 x 5286. Update - note you will need to go to the vertical orientation for this to work (still taking four shots).
(6) Also if there are people around either shoot when there aren't that many or shoot when there are interesting ones (I did that some of the time, but not always as some locations were so busy I just shot when I could). I was very happy with the Tower Bridge shot in this regard as I could do just what I wanted.
(7) In PtGui if any images get rotated after aligning then check for Control Points between opposite image pairs, as they shouldn't have any, so delete them (highlight an image in the control point editor and it will bold all images with control points linked to it). Currently I just let the optimiser sort it out, which it does okay, but I suspect this method is better.
(8) If it's sunny then make the shot with the most of your shadow in it a "10 degree up" one.

I did have an extra one that said in PtGui not to select Viewpoint optimisation, as lots of people say it's a bad idea in my kind of cases, but after some experimentation I think it should be selected.

Further examples:

http://www.viewat.org/?i=en&id_aut=7366&id_pn=22651&sec=pn

http://www.viewat.org/?i=en&id_aut=7366&id_pn=22646&sec=pn

Look carefully and see what you can spot what relates to the above...

P.S. PtGui Pro just won out over Autopano Pro in my evaluations. If you have the latter I'd try with that first.

I know I don't post that many photos here, hopefully this kinda counts...

Plus finally... if anyone uses this post as guidance to make their own panoramas please point me at them, as I would be most interested to see what people come up with...

John

P.S. A free alternative to PtGui Pro is Hugin, it's quite similar but I haven't used it, it's available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugi.../hugin-2012.0/

(c) 2013

[ST-EOS]

Re: Wide Angle on a FF

John I do like these 360 Panos you have produced, as well as being amazing the images make me feel dizzy .

I assume that you used the cotton and weight arrangement rather than a tripod?