Sorry another Wide Angle Lens Question-T3i indoors

teatimecrumpet · Mar 25, 2014

Hi,

New to DSLR and sorry for the questions. But I'm hoping you can help me with picking out a Wide Angle lens. I just got my T3i and it was intended for indoor shots in apartments so subjects are rather close probably 6feet most of the time. I have stock 18-55mm IS and a 55-250mm IS lens. I was unhappy with the results color depth and sharpness of shots indoors. Particularly with how a pinstriped suit looked as it turned it to almost a single color. Maybe my problem is with the camera and not the lens. I've shot the suit in low light (different indoor bulbs overehead), bounced flash, and on a sunny day (but not full direct sunlight) all on tripod. No sharp lines on anything in the photos.

Since I'm shooting at pretty close range but want to get a fuller frame I figure I should start with a new lens. (open to suggestions on a new camera too as I might just sell/give mine to my brother who just had a baby. For a new camera I'd probably go used and try to stay within $2000-lens included)

I'd like to stick in the $500-$600 range and have seen these suggested:
Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM
Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM SLR
Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 AT-X116 Pro DX

Really all of this is just for fun. But want to take nice pictures maybe not perfectly fit for a fasion mag but good enough I guess...if that makes sense.

thanks in advance!

ronlane · Mar 25, 2014

Are you shooting on a tripod? This will help you with sharpness.

You mention the pin striped suit. Are you wanting this for portrait work? If that is the case, I wouldn't suggest going to one of the ultrawide lenses that you have listed. They will cause distortion of the face.

That being said, I've heard good things about the Tokina 11-16mm and it is actually on my list of wants.

robbins.photo · Mar 25, 2014

teatimecrumpet said:
Hi,

New to DSLR and sorry for the questions. But I'm hoping you can help me with picking out a Wide Angle lens. I just got my T3i and it was intended for indoor shots in apartments so subjects are rather close probably 6feet most of the time. I have stock 18-55mm IS and a 55-250mm IS lens. I was unhappy with the results color depth and sharpness of shots indoors. Particularly with how a pinstriped suit looked as it turned it to almost a single color. Maybe my problem is with the camera and not the lens. I've shot the suit in low light (different indoor bulbs overehead), bounced flash, and on a sunny day (but not full direct sunlight) all on tripod. No sharp lines on anything in the photos.

Since I'm shooting at pretty close range but want to get a fuller frame I figure I should start with a new lens. (open to suggestions on a new camera too as I might just sell/give mine to my brother who just had a baby. For a new camera I'd probably go used and try to stay within $2000-lens included)

I'd like to stick in the $500-$600 range and have seen these suggested:
Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM
Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM SLR
Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 AT-X116 Pro DX

Really all of this is just for fun. But want to take nice pictures maybe not perfectly fit for a fasion mag but good enough I guess...if that makes sense.

thanks in advance!

Well if you found your current 18-55 mm lens wide enough for what your doing, I'd probably look at this one:

Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8 EX DC OS HSM Zoom Lens for Canon 583101 B&H

Dao · Mar 25, 2014

Can you post one of the photo here so that we can see what the issues are?

NjStacker22 · Mar 25, 2014

I have been shooting (lots of indoor work) with my Canon 10-22mm and I love it... that's obviously just my experience though.

D-B-J · Mar 25, 2014

I have no experience with the other two, but I am always impressed by the performance of my Tokina 11-16 2.8

Jake

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

pgriz · Mar 25, 2014

Methinks the problem is not the lens but the light you have, and the way you are recording it. Are you shooting on a tripod? What focusing method(s) are you using? How are you preventing camera shake?

teatimecrumpet · Mar 26, 2014

ronlane said:
Are you shooting on a tripod? This will help you with sharpness.

You mention the pin striped suit. Are you wanting this for portrait work? If that is the case, I wouldn't suggest going to one of the ultrawide lenses that you have listed. They will cause distortion of the face.
QUOTE]

Thanks Ron, I'm using a tripod. By portrait do you mean pretty close up? I'm looking to capture subjects 6 or so feet away and try and capture the room around them. But I would want to avoid too much fisheye effect

robbins.photo said:

teatimecrumpet said:

Hi,

Well if you found your current 18-55 mm lens wide enough for what your doing, I'd probably look at this one:

Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8 EX DC OS HSM Zoom Lens for Canon 583101 B&H

Click to expand...

Felt I wanted to move my camera outside past the wall when taking shots to capture more

Dao said:

Can you post one of the photo here so that we can see what the issues are?

Click to expand...

Hi Dao...my room looks like a bomb went off and would be embarrased to show it but that's where I'm trying to take a pic...which makes me completely unhelpful to what I'm asking for.

NjStacker22 said:

I have been shooting (lots of indoor work) with my Canon 10-22mm and I love it... that's obviously just my experience though.

Click to expand...

Do you have a link to your shots?

D-B-J said:

I have no experience with the other two, but I am always impressed by the performance of my Tokina 11-16 2.8

Jake

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Click to expand...

Do you have a link to your shots as well?

pgriz said:

Methinks the problem is not the lens but the light you have, and the way you are recording it. Are you shooting on a tripod? What focusing method(s) are you using? How are you preventing camera shake?

Click to expand...

I think you're right but would one of the above mentioned lenses still offer better image quality over the stock lens? I am shooting on a tripod. And tried both auto and manual focus. The shots didn't make me feel like the camera was broken but I did feel as though a point and shoot camera could have done just as good of a job.

Click to expand...

teatimecrumpet · Mar 26, 2014

Thanks All! (and wow with the replies so quickly for an oft asked about question!)...

What should I expect in terms of $$s for one of the lenses above in used condition? 50% off? less?

Is getting one of the above more for wider angle or does it offer image quality improvements over stock as well?

Gavjenks · Mar 26, 2014

Do you have a link to your shots?

You can get hundreds of example photos from any lens on this website, and search by focal length of the shot, etc.:
Full-size sample photos from Tokina 11-16mm F/2.8 (I typed in the tokina for you in this link)

They will cause distortion of the face.

Also nitpick: being close up does not "distort" faces, it's simply not how we are used to looking at them. If you were 6 inches from a person's face, it would look the same to your retina, too. But then you wouldn't see the scene around it, because your eye isn't that wide angle, per se. So when you do see the scene, your brain thinks you're 10 feet away, and expects 10 feet away facial proportions.

By portrait do you mean pretty close up?

Portraits just mean pictures of people. Generally you don't want to be close up for portraits for the above-mentioned reasons. You want to be 10+ feet away USUALLY for a typical portrait. So that means if you want the scene around them, you need a wide angle lens to do so at ~10 feet. If you want just their face, instead of getting closer, you use a 200mm lens to do that still from ~10 feet.

memento · Mar 26, 2014

Check out the 15-85 before looking into ultra-wides. Canon U.S.A. : Consumer & Home Office : EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM
Using an ultra-wide lens for portraiture is tricky.

lambertpix · Mar 26, 2014

FWIW, if nobody's mentioned it already, Tamron has a 17-50 f/2.8 lens that's pretty well-liked if you don't actually need a wider focal length than you've got. I haven't tried it, but I've got a friend who loves his.

You should also understand that the extra light-gathering of a faster lens isn't a magic cure-all -- not only will it fail to turn dark to light, but it also decreases your depth of field when you shoot wide-open, which might not always be what you want to accomplish. It sounds like you've already been working on some other techniques to help handle these tricky conditions (tripod, flash, etc.), so you're on the right track, but beware the temptation to ascribe more "fix" to a new lens than it's capable of.

Gavjenks said:
They will cause distortion of the face.

Click to expand...

Also nitpick: being close up does not "distort" faces, it's simply not how we are used to looking at them. If you were 6 inches from a person's face, it would look the same to your retina, too. But then you wouldn't see the scene around it, because your eye isn't that wide angle, per se. So when you do see the scene, your brain thinks you're 10 feet away, and expects 10 feet away facial proportions.

I think there's an interesting experiment in there somewhere, if I could figure out how to set it up, but I think for our purposes as photographers, we have to acknowledge that viewers' brains operate on a "real"scene differently than they operate on the 2D projections we're creating with our cameras. It's true that our brains don't recognize distortion of a face as we get close to it, but I'm not sure that (alone) is helpful for us.

In my case (I can't speak for anyone else), I'm also able to move a grid right up to my nose, and I still see straight lines -- not the barrel distortion pattern I'd expect to see if I shot the same grid with a wide-angle lens. The same brain-retina combination is either too smart or not smart enough to correct a wide-angle 2D image in the same way that my eyes do with a real-time scene. I suspect it stems in part, at least, from the fact that I've got two eyes, because when I cover one eye, I do start to perceive some distortion from a grid very close to my eye.

I've also seen some of those focal length experiments where a model is framed the same at focal lengths ranging from wide to tele, and I absolutely perceive the difference in the resulting photos. Again, I think the fact that our brains correct this effect in real life is important, but it's also important to note that our brains *don't* correct that effect to the same extent in photos.

Gavjenks · Mar 26, 2014

It's true that our brains don't recognize distortion of a face as we get close to it, but I'm not sure that (alone) is helpful for us.

No I think your brain DOES recognize the difference. And it is very actively correcting in photos. But it simply calibrates itself to expect the proportions that "go with" the estimated distance to the subject, in the eye's typical focal length(s). This makes problems when you shoot at any focal length other than about 65mm. So when you see a picture with plenty of trees and context all around, it goes "hm, okay I must be about 10 or more feet away, because that's how far I'd be at 65mm to see all those trees around the person" but then you get the huge noses and stuff that you're only used to seeing a foot away, and the mismatch is a problem.

The brain has to resolve the conflict somehow, and the weaker of the two assumptions is the facial proportions -- because everything you look at ever reinforces the distance assumption, whereas only faces reinforce the face proportion assumptions, AND you know that people can be disfigured, etc. in real life. So it is a better guess to the brain to assume that the proportions really ARE weird on the person, not that it guessed distance incorrectly.

Thus the brain resolves the conflict not by changing its mind about distance, but by maintaining the distance assumption and instead interpreting the person as simply a weird ugly person with a big nose.

not the barrel distortion pattern I'd expect to see if I shot the same grid with a wide-angle lens.

Barrel distortion is a separate issue entirely.
BOTH barrel distortion (if/when it exists) AND simply the mathematics of perspective when near something = bigger noses. But probably 95-99% of the effect of big noses you see is from perspective, not imperfect lenses.
In other words, a 14mm lens from 6 inches away, even if it was optically perfect and crafted by the very gods themselves, would still show big noses, about as big as our lenses do.

If your nose WEREN'T big in a wide angle shot from close up, then THAT would be the evidence of a major lens distortion / flaw in your glass.

D-B-J · Mar 26, 2014

There's a few with it.

grafxman · Mar 26, 2014

teatimecrumpet said:
Hi,

New to DSLR and sorry for the questions. But I'm hoping you can help me with picking out a Wide Angle lens. I just got my T3i and it was intended for indoor shots in apartments so subjects are rather close probably 6feet most of the time. I have stock 18-55mm IS and a 55-250mm IS lens. I was unhappy with the results color depth and sharpness of shots indoors. Particularly with how a pinstriped suit looked as it turned it to almost a single color. Maybe my problem is with the camera and not the lens. I've shot the suit in low light (different indoor bulbs overehead), bounced flash, and on a sunny day (but not full direct sunlight) all on tripod. No sharp lines on anything in the photos.

Since I'm shooting at pretty close range but want to get a fuller frame I figure I should start with a new lens. (open to suggestions on a new camera too as I might just sell/give mine to my brother who just had a baby. For a new camera I'd probably go used and try to stay within $2000-lens included)

I'd like to stick in the $500-$600 range and have seen these suggested:
Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM
Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM SLR
Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 AT-X116 Pro DX

Really all of this is just for fun. But want to take nice pictures maybe not perfectly fit for a fasion mag but good enough I guess...if that makes sense.

thanks in advance!