That thing's boss. (Off-Topic)

by Schedonnardus, Texas, Friday, May 29, 2015, 18:06 (3260 days ago) @ Funkmon

Excellent photoing, too, of course. I like that you got colour out of the Orion Nebula in the night photo. Do you find having a wide angle like that helps your photos quite a bit, or does it not add much when you're out doing photography?

I find more and more I just have my fast normal pancake on and never really use a wider or longer lens. I've never really had one wider than 28mm though I've been wanting one for a long time. Though I guess I do have a 9mm body (18mm equivalent) fisheye lens from Olympus, I don't quite count it, since it's mostly to just have on the body while I'm not doing anything. It's also super soft in the corners.

Since I moved from Canon, my lens choices have gone way down, practically. In order to get a nice wide angle like that, I'd need to drop $700 and it still wouldn't be wide enough.

I could get a 7.5mm fisheye lens and just defisheye it in lightroom or something. Do you think that's a good choice? What would you do?

its a pretty niche lens, b/c its manual focus and manual aperture only. Last year, my wife and I planned trips to Oregon (i lived there for a few years) and Alaska; so i justified getting the lens for landscapes. It was only about $300.

I've only used it a handful of times for landscapes and astro-landscapes. Having an extremely wide lens gives you a lot more leeway on your depth of field. I mostly use a 28-75, and a 70-300 (i also have a cheap 50mm 1.8).

I find that a lot of the time, i just take overlapping shots with my 28-75 and stitch them together in photoshop. but for doing star photography, that's really not practical b/c you need longer exposure times, and the stars would move between adjacent photographs. So having the really wide lens is great for that.

Oh, and it's also great for indoor shots. I've used it to photograph the house at Christmas, or really nice hotel rooms while traveling, b/c i can fit everything into the lens.

I think getting a really wide fisheye would be even more niche. You'll get some neat looking photos from it, but you probably wouldn't use it very much, b/c it's not that practical.

You could always rent a lens from lensrentals.com, or borrowlenses.com and see if you like it or not.