This summer I'll be doing a lot of hiking into the alpine along with a vacation to Alberta, B.C. I plan to take thousands of photos this summer and hope to pick out the best of them and print 8x10s and 11x14s to be sold locally.
I'm shooting with a D30 so getting a wide angle shot isn't the easiest thing in the world. Since one of my favorite forms of photography is landscape photography, I really need an ultra-wide lens to be used as a wide-angle for my landscape photos.
I've found a couple zoom lenses from third party companies, but I'm a bit shaky about the quality of the lenses because of the size of prints I'll be working with.
The two lenses were a 19-35mm from Tamron and the Sigma 18-50mm (I've only been able to find this as a 'kit' with a 55-200mm lens, anyone know if you can buy it seperately?). So, since I'll most likely end up shooting a third party lens, I might as well get a prime lens to get the best quality.
I'm looking for something 19mm or wider, and maybe even a zoom lens if the quality is decent.
My budget will be around $200 Canadian, so a used, third party lens is the only thing in question. I know it'd be very hard to find, but I'm desperate here.
I'm afraid with a $200 Canadian budget that will be a tough call.
Wide angles wider than 20mm are expensive. Even a Sigma 20mm/1.8 is US$359. Perhaps if you are willing to pay more and go less wide you can consider
a) EF 24mm/2.8 - excellent quality for US$275
b) EF 28mm/2.8 - excellent quality for US$160
You can try looking in ebay (but be careful of scams) or the buy/sell section here for good deals on lenses that have cosmetic defects but otherwise fine optically
If you had the Digital Rebel, you would have a cheap US$100 kit lens EFS 18-55mm that has decent quality. Maybe you can consider borrowing a Digital Rebel with kit lens instead - or maybe use a film camera
You can always buy a used ef-s lens and modify it. If you're lucky, you can find them for lower then 100 US.
Of course this means a lot of work to.. well to get it to work, on your D30 that is. It's either that or the Sigma 18-50mm which is $200 at www.henrys.ca. The latter sounds a lot easier.. athough you'd have to pay taxes and shipping.
If you can expand your budget just a bit, look for either a used Sigma 20/1.8 (I know, it's not 19mm or wider but on the 10D it's a fairly nice field of view) or Tokina 17/3.5. I found a used Sigma 20/1.8 which I like very much for $250. Used Tokina's are going for $299 from KEH so you can probably locate one cheaper privately. If you plan on using the d30 and printing fairly large prints to sell, I'd think you'd want the highest quality lens you could afford so I'd recommend against a zoom in this price range. Also, don't forget that you can make up for not having an ultrawide lens by stitching images together and frankly ultra wides aren't always the answer for lanscape shots since the wider they are, the further away your subject appears to be and the less detail you'll often have in the final image.
Happy lens hunting and enjoy your travels!
Cheers!
There really isnt all that much to choose from. If you want to stick with Canon your widest choice that isnt a fisheye is the 20mm 2.8. Good lens but probably not going to find it for $200CDN. The 24mm canon is good too. Not all that wide but for the budget it would work great for you. Im often the kind to try to stick with Canon lenses. Ive used others and just really dont like them as much.
Good luck. You can make anything work for you out on the trail. You might just have to use your head/feet and save some when it comes to your wallet.
If you're selling these shots then even just selling 20 shots at $50 each will pay for a 17-40. I don't really see how you could sell shots off of a Sigma kit lens.
Don't rule out a used Sigma or Canon 15mm Fisheye. They're quite sharp, quite wide (someone much smarter than me calculated a 12.5mm equivalent after correction for the FE distortion), and relatively CA free. I've been much more impressed with my 15mmFE than with previous 14mm, 16-35mm or 24mm lenses. I haven't looked at what these lenses cost used, but they are worth investigating.
KEH has a used Tokina 17mm f3.5 for $299 USD. This lens rated only behind the Canon 20mm and the Sigma 20mm in Photozone in the list of ultra-wide primes. A little above your target price, but might want to give it some thought.
As a happy Sigma fish owner I'd have to say that using a fish exclusively for landscape shots would get tiring after a while. Dealing with either composing the shot to limit distortion or dealing with it in post processing can get tedious. Post processing also loses some of the frame and leads to at least a slight loss in image quality.
I'll also give a recommendation towards the Zenitar. I got mine off ebay for C$200 shipped. I've only had good results with it! It's manual focus, but at that focal length, I've had no problems with it.
Pictures 5386, 5420, 1600 foot waterfall, 5759, 5830, 5855, 5878, 5891 among others were shot with a 10d, Tamron 19-35mm, and a Hoya SMC Polarizer in some cases.
