Very, VERY wide lenses for your DSLR

Testing the Sigma 12-24mm f/ 4.5-5.6
against other super-wide lenses

Wide angle composition

I love the perspective a really wide lens gives. When everything is the same size in a picture, your viewer’s eye gets confused and tries to find something to go to. If you put something in the foreground of the scene with a wide angle lens, that thing is disproportionately large so the viewer’s eye has an obvious target.

Having to get so close to your subject has the wonderful side effect of preventing anything or anyone else from being between you and your subject.

Getting more into the picture

Another, more common reason for getting a very wide angle lens is because you want to include more in the photo than otherwise possible… you can’t get back far enough to include everything you want in the scene. I often run into this problem at work. Wine tasting rooms, for instance, aren’t usually very large, but photos of them are very important in the winery’s advertising.

It depends upon your camera’s sensor size

I have a Canon 5D MkII full frame camera, so my lenses are all 1.6 times wider than they’d seem if they were on an APS-C (smaller sensor) camera such as the Canon 50D. If you’re using a crop-sensor camera, you can do your own math to figure out how the lenses I mention would work on your camera.

For crop-sensor cameras, you have a good selection from which to choose:
Canon 10-20mm f/3.5-4.5 (or Nikon 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5)
Tamron 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5
Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 (I’d like that wide aperture!)
Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6
None of these lenses will fit on a full-sensor camera, but on the wide end they’re about the equivalent of 17mm when used on a smaller sensor camera.

My desire for a very wide lens for my 5D Mk II led me to purchase a Canon 17-40mm f/4L lens. It’s a wonderful, sharp lens, but I often work in very dim places (such as wine caves), so I changed to the terrific 16-35mm f/2.8L. The optics of the 17-40mm were just as good as my current 16-35mm, but that one extra stop can mean the difference between acceptable and unacceptable motion blur (or acceptable and unacceptable ISO noise) in very dim situations.

I carry the 16-35mm f/2.8L with me everywhere and have taken many of my better photos with it, but there are often situations in which I want a lens which is even wider. Last year I bought a Canon 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens and it brings a lot more of the scene into the picture, but it has extreme distortion; that’s part of the fun of that lens.

A 15mm Fisheye view from the Empire State Building

The 15mm is so small I almost always have it with me, as well, but I don’t use it nearly as often as the 16-35mm.

Very wide lenses for full-sensor cameras

The Photozo’s Lens Guru, Glenn Summerbell (Cadwell) suggested a lens I’d never heard of, the Sigma 12-24mm f/ 4.5-5.6, so I decided to check it out. B&H Photo-Video was kind enough to loan it to me to review in this article, so I’ll compare its wide end to that of my 16-35mm and my 15mm fisheye lens.

Comparing the Sigma against
Canon’s 17-40mm and 15mm lenses

If I’d had my 17-40mm f/4L lens handy, it would’ve been a more fair comparison, as the Sigma 12-24mm, the Canon 15mm and the Canon 17-40mm are in the same price range (even though the 17-40mm is an “L” lens). The 16-35mm is almost twice the price (even though the optics are equivalent), so let’s try to ignore that it’s an f/2.8 lens and pretend we’re comparing it to the 17-40mm as far as price is concerned.

While speaking of price, I left another competitor out of this comparison due to the price difference between it an the others. From what I’ve read, the Canon 14mm f/2.8L lens would’ve been head and shoulders above the compared lenses, but it’s practically three times the price of the others; an unfair comparison.

Testing only the widest settings

My need is for the wide end of a lens, so I only compared the performance of these three lenses at their widest angle settings 16mm, 15mm and 12mm. I didn’t compare the long end of the two zooms at all, since I have other good lenses in that range.

Testing in cramped quarters

I found several examples of places where a photographer would require a very wide lens. Below is one series of photos taken in the tasting room at Rutherford Hill Winery, another in the back seat of a stretch limousine and another set which I took in a restroom which measured 78” in both length and width. The pictures in each series were taken from the same camera position.

First test: The tasting room

To give you an orientation about how wide the lenses I’m testing are, I included a true 24mm shot among this first series. When I was shooting 35mm film, a 24mm lens was considered a pretty darned wide lens… the next thing to a fisheye, practically.

The object of this tasting room photo is to show how spacious and beautiful the room is; that customers have plenty of room to move around and a lot to see.

Of course the 24mm shot doesn’t show much at all. My “really wide” 16mm does a lot better. The fisheye shows nearly all of the tasting room, wall to wall, but has extreme barrel distortion. My bosses were really happy with that Sigma 12mm image! It shows a large portion of the room with very little distortion.

Second test: Inside a stretch limo

Imagine you’ve been hired to do an ad or a brochure for a limousine company. They want to emphasize how roomy their stretch limos are. Take these three lenses along with you and see what you think:

What I used to think of as my super wide 16mm doesn’t really convey how very spacious this huge car is. You could very comfortably fit six people in this back area. (The couple facing sideways would act as bartenders for the fore and aft couples.) Again, the fisheye shows the whole passenger area but at the expense of barrel distortion. The 12mm does a great job of expressing the roominess and luxurious feel.

Third test: The decor of a very small room

Think about how small 78 inches is. Many people you know are six feet tall. This recently decorated “powder” room is only six and a half feet square. It’s an extremely small room. Now imagine the interior decorator has hired you to photograph it for her. She specializes in making the most out of small spaces and could turn a lot of business your way.

Again, the 16mm image doesn’t show enough of the room, the 15mm fisheye photo has extreme barrel distortion (hey, you can see all four walls!) but the 12mm image shows two full walls (with bits of the other two), including all of the window in one corner and all of the mirror in the other corner. There’s a little perspective distortion because I pointed the camera down a bit to show the tile floor. This could easily be corrected in editing.

De-Fishing a fisheye photo

Using a Photoshop plug-in such as DXo Optics Pro 5 Elite or even Photoshop’s Transform>Warp tool, it’s often pretty easy to remove the barrel distortion from a fisheye photo. Below you can see the stretching of the image I did to transform the 15mm image above.

Notice how the proportions of the objects in the room have been distorted. The 12mm image shows the proportions of the room much more accurately.

Image quality

The “acid test” of any image is when you view it at 100% on a computer monitor. Below are 100% crops from the center of those three images.

All digital images need to be sharpened somewhat, and I haven’t sharpened any of these. They were all hand held, so there may be a very smalll amount of camera motion blur in them, but any of them would certainly be sharp enough for our interior decorator’s portfolio. You can see a bit of a warm shift in the 12mm, but again that’s’ easly modified in editing.

These were all shot at f/8, the sweet spot of the 12mm lens. It’s not as sharp as the 16-35mm or the 15mm at f/4.5, nor will it open to f/2.8 as they will. I also noticed a bit of vignetting (slight darkening at the edges, especially at wider apertures) but this, too can be easily fixed processing. In other words, this lens has some limitations, but considering that it gives an image which no other lens can, I’m very impressed with its performance.

Lens caps are necessary on super wide lenses

I use a clear filter on my lenses instead of a lens cap This isn’t possible on the Canon 15mm or Sigma 12-24mm due to their protruding front elements. I’d read comments about the cap on the 15mm… some folks found it fell off too easily. Personally, I really like that lens cap. It’s solid metal and I’ve never had a problem with it since I put a small strip of gaffer’s tape on the inside lip. That adds just enough friction to keep it on, but it’s easy enough to remove when I want to. I didn’t care at all for the cap on the Sigma, though. It’s a metal cylinder fitted with a plastic Sigma lens cap at the end. The plastic cap easily pops off leaving the metal cylinder vulnerable to distortion while it’s in the camera bag. I’d suggest using the very inexpensive neoprene OP/TECH mini hood hat instead.

Conclusions

These are all great lenses for their specific purposes. I’m delighted to have the 16-35mm and 15mm in my everyday bag, but for tight interiors and other extreme wide angle shots, I have a suggestion. Estimate how much money an extremely wide angle lens will make for you the first year or two you own it. If the figure you come up with is about $1,000, the Sigma 12-24mm will more than pay for itself in that time. If you’re photographing a lot of high-end bathrooms, though, the Canon 14mm f/2.8L will be the best lens you ever bought for that purpose.

Thanks to B&H Photo-Video for loaning me the Sigma 12-24mm lens to test, and thanks to Glenn Summerbell for suggesting it! You can read reviews by other people who’ve purchased these lenses on the B&H Web site:

For any camera, including full-sensor cameras (be sure to get one which will mount to your brand of camera):
Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Canon 17-40mm f/4L
Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L
Canon 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye
Canon 14mm f/2.8L

For “crop-sensor” cameras:
Canon 10-20mm f/3.5-4.5
Tamron 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5
Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8
Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6
Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8

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