newbie questions!

[magicmonkey]

Sorry if these are very basic questions but I'm a basic kind of guy!

I have a 350D and I am itching to get myself a wide angle lens.

Currently I'm not too hot on the technical side of things and am just going for shots I like and hoping to pick the technical stuff up as and when I need to.

so, the questions are, firstly, what technically defines a lens as being a wide angle lens? and secondly, what is a good lens of the 350D taking the 1.6 crop into account?

Any answers gratefully recieved!

 

[Rob]

There was a recent thread I started on wide angle lenses for the 20D, which would apply equally to your camera.

A wide angle lens (this is my personal conjecture) is one which is less magnification than the human eye. On a 35mm film camera this would be under 50mm. However, generally, people would probably consider < 28mm to be really actually "wide angle". With digital, you've got to divide the numbers by your crop number, so wide begins at 32mm ish. There are lots of lenses like the Sigma 10-40mm which cover this kind of range.

Rob

 

[markc]

The diagonal measurement of 35mm film is 43.27mm. This is what the normal is usually based on and there's usually some leeway to either side. In my mind, 40-55mm is normal, but this is mainly because this is the range you usually see being used on cameras. Many Canon digitals have a sensor diagonal of 27.1 mm, so it would probably be best to use something like 22-35 for their normal instead of using the crop factor to calculate based on 50mm (though I've done that in the past).

 

[magicmonkey]

ok, I think you've inadvertantly helped me grap the concept of how zooming in on something hundreds of yards away can be expressed in millimeters! I pretty much get what you mean here but this brings me onto a thirs question (if you'll bear with me!). What is the difference between a wide angle and an ultra wide angle? I'm assuming that an ultra wide angle would probably be something like 15mm and lower, is that more or less right?

 

[Rob]

Yeah, there's not really an official: this is wide, this is ultra-wide really, but ultra-wide normally means verging on fish-eye type wide, probably with noticable barrel distortion.

Rob