Landscape / Panorama lens?

[Artisticmind]

Well, I love taking landscape photographs and I really want to start taking more panoramas. I am wondering what lenses you would recommend. I have a 450d/XSi and I am on a low budget and was looking at the Canon 50mm II because I heard it is ultra sharp and is a great value lens for the price. However, when I shoot with the kit lens I am more towards the 18mm focal length. Would something shorter be worth going for to get a larger range of the landscape? Maybe like a 10-20mm or 20mm prime?

What are your thoughts?

[LarryD]

There is nothing wrong with a 50mm lens, but it is a carryover from film days. With the human eye, and it's stereoscopic, straight ahead view, a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera gave a good representation in the final print of what the viewer saw...and it became a standard..

A 50mm lens, however, on your camera has a 60% difference in perspective, so it is more like the old 85mm telephoto used to be..

Just to get back to "normal", you need a ~35mm lens........which used to be considered "wide angle"; and that is why you are at the short end of your kit lens most of the time..

If you want to be in the wide angle arena on a crop body camera then you want to be looking at lenses shorter than 28mm.......:)

[jrader]

I think if you want to do panoramics, you may want to avoid anything below about 20mm. You get some crazy distortion/curvature on the corners with fisheyes and it makes these images very hard to merge into panoramics.

I use the 17-40 on my 30D (which has a 1.6x crop factor) making it (17-40)*1.6 = 27-64mm. I don't worry too much about edge distortion. Only once in a blue moon do I have problems merging my panoramics. And at 27mm, I can fit more than enough in the frame.

Hope this helps.

John

[chauncey]

This is what would happen with a long lens and the opposite would occur with a shorter lens.
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=650533
Depends on what you want to emphasize.