g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Wednesday, February 23, 2005
18:06 - Begin camerablog mode

(top) link
Well, here goes, then.

I acquired a friend's old Canon EOS 10D body the other day, choosing it for the price he was willing to let me have it for as much as for the specific advantages it provides over and above the Digital Rebel/300D (better focussing and metering control), the 20D (price), and the new Digital Rebel XT/350D (price, and I'd have to wait). This means I've been sitting in my room dully taking lens-less pictures of big colorful blurs in the evenings while I wait for some lenses to arrive from B&H.

Said lenses, considering I'm just a beginner with SLRs, are an entry-level 50mm prime, and the 75-300 image-stabilized zoom telephoto that everybody seems to have. These make for a barely $450 package all told, not bad for a beginning lens loadout. I'm well aware that the 75-300 isn't the most awesome lens in the entire world, but I've been obsessively reading review pages of just about every lens in my ranges of interest, and studying pages like this one explaining what f/stops are all about, preparing myself for the inevitable forking out in the future of large wads of cash for better lenses once I convince myself that my inability to take interesting pictures with either of these two starter lenses has more to do with my dearth of expensive equipment than with my inability to spot good photo locations or apply sound techniques.

Sooner or later I'll be getting a good super-wide lens, for example, something that maxes out at between 10 and 16mm; but I held off on picking one up right away because there appears to have been a large number of new super-wide lenses released or announced just in the last few months. See, apparently now that digital SLRs (with their sensor size smaller than a 35mm frame by a factor of 1.6, by which you must multiply the focal length of any lens you attach to get its film equivalent length) have reached the magic $1000 price point, suddenly all the lens manufacturers are starting to realize that they'd better start bringing out lenses to track the market shift in progress. That doesn't mean new telephotos; digital SLRs have no problem with telephoto. That 300mm zoom I'm getting will be an effective 480mm, so no worries there (and since on digitals you can select the ISO with a flip of a wheel rather than loading in a new film cartridge and discarding the old one, aperture size isn't as big a worry either). The problem is wide-angle.

Super-wide lenses that Canon, Sigma, Tamron, and Tokina have had on the market for some time now tend to be designed more for film than for digital, which means a 17mm lens gets oohs and aahs from reviewers bowled over by how cool it is to do really wide shots, especially for things like big sweeping landscapes and architecture (both of which I imagine I'll be doing a lot of). I have to remind myself, though, that these reviewers are often basing their impressions on the lenses' film performance, not digital; and as a digital shooter, I'd have to go to a 11mm lens to get the same effects. The problem is that most of the lenses in that class currently available, with the exception of the über-expensive Canons—the Sigma 12-24, the Sigma 15-30, the Sigma 17-35, and the Tamron 17-35—all seem to have difficulty coming to terms with what kind of animal they are. The Sigmas all seem to have big problems with blurriness and distortion at the edges at full wideness; but the complaints, it must be remembered, come primarily from film shooters who actually see those extreme corners of the frame (on the digital sensors, those extra few millimeters that you pay so much for get cut off, so you have to buy shorter and shorter lenses to get the same effect). So a digital shooter like me probably wouldn't notice the difference—but that's still sort of a crap shoot, and not really a solution, as it would only be acceptable by accidental technicalities. And the Tamron 11-18 which was announced last year (but still isn't available) and the also-upcoming Tokina 12-24 both appear to be designed specifically for digital cameras, in that the optics are smaller and produce an image only big enough for the digital sensor, not for a full 35mm film frame—so if you used such a lens on a film SLR, the corners would be blackened off like you shot it from inside a tunnel. Similarly, Canon is starting to bring out lenses in the EF-S series, like this mediocre but cheap 18-55 that's packaged as a kit with all their new DSLRs, and this markedly better (especially for the price) 10-22, which are designed not even to fit on any cameras other than their newer digitals, namely the 300D, 20D, and (presumably) 350D. Not, notably, the 10D, which I have. (Sigh.)

Sigma is apparently only just now bringing out a new series of DSLR lenses designed to fit what appear to be my needs, helpfully stepped down from "standard" sizes by that 1.6 multiplier: a 30mm prime (instead of the usual 50mm), a 10-20, and an 18-200. Clearly intended to replace their earlier line of blurry-cornered lenses that are acceptable on DSLRs only because they've got blinders on, these lenses might be what I need to wait for. Canon doesn't appear to be interested in making a version of that $799 10-22 that will fit on the 10D, otherwise I'd go for it and get what are universally regarded as the superior optics in the industry; so it's the 10-20 Sigma (the company has its fierce adherents), or possibly the Tokina 12-24 or Tamron 11-18 when any of the three is finally available and people have had a chance to start posting reviews of them.

The weird thing that I've discovered about all this is that photo geeks, far unlike computer geeks (and especially car geeks), are an overwhelmingly positive bunch. People are much more likely to rate their gear higher than I'd have expected, even when it has clear shortcomings, and to develop elaborate and emotional defenses of particular lenses (usually taking the form of pointing to great photos they've taken with a lens that others have argued is a poor entrant) befitting hard-core Mac nerds... but there is nary an unkind word to be hurled across brand lines. People say lots of nice things about Canon lenses, but they're curiously unwilling to brand Sigmas as universally inferior, or even to launch partisan Canon-vs-Nikon battles (this post by SKBubba makes no value judgments, just evaluates the issues on a pure "numbers" basis: They're all fine cameras). I guess a lot of it has to do with people having spent hundreds of dollars per lens, often as rank beginners, and then being unwilling to come out in public and say they'd made a mistake; few, evidently, in this high-stakes game are prepared to return bad lenses and then write scathing reviews of them (though such people do exist, just not in the numbers I'd have expected)—I think a lot of people are unwilling to accept that a blurry or even a chromatic-aberration-laden photo is the lens's fault and not somehow their own. So I'm pretty sure that if I'm about to start camerablogging, and posting all these links and musings about various lenses, the feedback I'm bound to receive will be of the "helpful and anecdotal" variety, rather than the "bitter and vitriolic and derisive" variety (not that I've ever received much of the latter, for which I'm endlessly thankful).

The bottom line is that I don't think I'll be buying a super-wide lens until after I've mastered the camera with its basic prime and its image-stabilized telephoto, and until the Alaska trip looms imminent on the horizon and takes up the whole viewfinder. The lens manufacturers appear to have only just begun to bring out the digital-tuned wide-angles they've been working on for months in response to the sudden leap in demand for optics that serve small frame sizes (e.g. sub-$1K DSLRs) the same way they've been expected to serve 35mm film. My 50mm prime and 75-300 telephoto arrived today, according to the UPS online tracking system, as did the book I ordered, so I can start learning now. And there's six months between now and the time I'll really need something into which to try to cram all of Alaska's vistas; so I believe I'll wait and see what pans out.

But that doesn't mean I won't be appreciative of any suggestions or recommendations, of course.


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© Brian Tiemann