Squirrels Go Like This

Wide-angle fun

A couple of months have passed since I wrote about how I want an ultra-wide angle zoom lens for our Digital Rebel XTi camera. Since then I’ve seen a whole ton more neat photos on Flickr taken with the 10-22mm Canon and 10-20mm Sigma lenses. Not to mention the neat photos taken by our wedding photographer Albert Yee of the interior of the church, who used some sort of wide-angle Nikon equivalent.

The handwriting’s on the wall… I need a wide-angle lens! But which one? Earlier I’d been thinking that the 17-55mm F/4 L Canon lens might be a good candidate. Until I realized that the “kit” lens that came with the XTi is an 18-55mm lens. It’s not a bad lens, but 17mm really isn’t all that wide. Not to mention how redundant it would be…

Clearly, the only ultra-wide angle zoom lens worth buying is one that goes to 10mm. That also means buying an “EF-S” lens, which you can’t use on film cameras or “full frame sensor” DSLR cameras. (explanation.) Everything I’ve read about the Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens has been so overwhelmingly positive that I decided to just go for it.

And now we have it. It’s an amazing lens. At 10mm, you can stand within 10 feet of a 5 story building and get the entire building in the shot. Kind of mind blowing, really. To illustrate this, I set up a tripod and took a series of photos aimed the exact same way: the first at 35mm (56mm film equiv.) with our 35mm F/2 lens for comparison; the second at 22mm (35.2mm film equiv.); and the third at 10mm (16mm film equiv.).

Check out the results:

35mm

22mm

10mm

Crazy… You’d think I’d moved the tripod back about 30 feet from 35mm down to 10mm, but that’s all lens. Awesome.

I think we’re going to have a lot of fun with this!