John M. Setzler, Jr.

Wide Angle at the Park

Originally uploaded by John Setzler.

I spent a little time in the park this afternoon. For late January, the weather was actually nice. The temperature was in the mid 50’s. The sky was slightly overcast with a mild breeze in the air. Winter has only peeked out a few times here in western North Carolina, but I’m sure February will be cold.

I spent a while shooting at ducks and a pair of Canadian Geese. After I got tired of that, I put on the wide angle lens. True wide angle photography is a real challenge on digital cameras with the APS-C sensor. These sensors (or the one in my camera) create a 1.6x crop factor compared to their 35mm film counterparts. A standard 28mm lens, which is relatively wide angle on a 35mm camera, works out to the equivalent of a 45mm lens, which isn’t wide at all. The reason this happens is because the digital sensor is 1.6x smaller than the 24×36mm film frame used by 35mm cameras. The physical size of the APS-C sensor is 15.1×22.7mm. So what happens here is that the lens projects the same size image onto the sensor as it would for a 35mm film camera, but since the sensor is smaller than a 35mm film frame, all you get is what falls on the sensor.

To get an equivalent of 28mm wide angle on my digital camera, I had purchased a 17-40mm zoom lens. At the 17mm wide end of that lens, I have roughly the equivalent of 27mm. That worked out fine for a while. The problem was that I really wanted a seriously wider lens than that. I started out with a Sigma 12-24mm lens. It was quite wide at the 12mm end, but I wasn’t very happy with the corner distortion. I didn’t keep the lens very long. When Canon introduced the 10-22 EF-S lens, it made me think about it all over again. I own two digital SLR cameras, and this 10-22mm lens would only work on one of them. I didn’t really want to purchase a lens that wouldn’t work on both cameras. When Sigma introduced their 10-20mm lens, I decided to buy it. I had several friends who had picked it up early, so I watched their results before I bought my own. (I’m very RARELY the first kid on the block to buy newly released equipment. I let other people find the bugs and quirks first.) This 10-20mm lens gives me the equivalent of 16mm on the wide end, which is about as wide as I would ever need to go.

There are digital SLR cameras out there that have the full-sized 24×36mm sensor, but we won’t talk about how poor I am and how much those cost. If I ever upgrade to one of those, my 17-40mm lens will be plenty wide for anything I would want to shoot with it.

When I really think about my lens collection, this 10-20mm lens gets less play than anything else in my bag. I simply do not shoot scenes that benefit greatly from wide angle. Landscape photography is one of the more popular areas where wide angle lenses, and I had landscapes in mind when I purchased it. I’m taking a trip to Chaco Canyon and Canyon de Chelly for a in Arizona during the first part of May. I will shoot some landscapes out there for sure.

Other than landscapes, the ultra-wide angle lenses can be used for dynamic and compositional enhancement (if you view it as enhancement) of scenes that aren’t traditionally suited to wide angle. In the photo above, the young boy is only 12 or 15′ away from my camera. The wide angle lens has a unique effect on objects in the scene. Objects that are closer to the lens tend to be exaggerated in size, while objects farther away tend to shrink. In the above photo, I used the railing on the wooden walkway to create a leading line to the young boy, who is the subject of the photo. That railing is about 6″ wide, but it appears to be wider at the near end due to wide angle distortion. If I had lowered the camera level, it would have increased the distortion even more.

I shot this simple self portrait by holding the camera above me. The lens was approximately 10″ from my face. My head, even though it is already huge, looks even bigger in the photo…

If you have a wide angle lens, what do you have and what is your favorite? What sort of photos do you make with it other than landscapes?