More Fun With The Wide Angle Lens

Friday evening I brought my new 10-20mm lens to work. Adam, one of our editors, wanted to see it. That was all the excuse I needed.

During a little lull between shows, I went up to the roof to take a few shots. I still don’t know exactly what this lens will do under every circumstance. Experimentation will solve that problem!

There had been scattered thunderstorms earlier Friday afternoon. By the time I was on the roof, all that was left were some well defined cumulus clouds covering half the sky.

I zoomed out all the way to 10mm and faced the eastern horizon. With the camera turned vertically&#185, I tilted up. In the viewfinder, I placed a tiny sliver of land at the bottom of the frame. The clouds you see at the top of this shot were nearly overhead.

In this shot the individual cloud details aren’t very important. With a wide angle lens they’re not seen well anyway.

What I wanted to show was the vastness of the sky and clouds. I’m reasonably happy with the result.

I have made some minor ‘fixes’ to this picture using Photoshop. Light fell off rapidly at the corners of the image. That’s typical of wide angle lenses. Photoshop has the ability to counteract what is called ‘vignetting’ by brightening only the corners.

Though the control is in the ‘distort’ menu, I don’t consider it playing with reality.

&#185 – In photography, vertical and horizontal framing are called portrait and landscape respectively.

One thought on “More Fun With The Wide Angle Lens”

  1. Geoff,

    Sigma makes a very fine lens, IMHO.

    I have the 18-200 Sigma on my D200 and I will stack that lens up against any of my Nikkor glass.

    Good shooting with the new “toy”. Looking forward to seeing more of your fine work.

    73

    W1TDP

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