We've have a bunch of threads dedicated to great lenses where people show their best images. I thought that a thread with the reverse might be fun - favorite shots taken with crappy lenses.
Rule: The lens must be a removable one (to avoid the thread being overrun mobile phone shots). The lenses in question should preferably be lousy in some objective sense i.e not a high quality expensive lens that you happen to hate for one reason or another. Also no Holgas, Lensbaby composers etc - i.e lenses that have been designed to be optically rubbish in order to provide an interesting look.
I'll start.
My choice of lens is the abysmal Sigma 18-200 f/3.5-6.3 OS. It was my only lens for several years - before I got actively interested in photography. I wasn't quite aware of how terrible it was until I had tried a few better lenses. It suffers from just about every optical aberration known to man kind, the resolution is poor at all detail levels and completely uneven across the frame. The contrast is low and the colors are poor. Super zooms tend to be poor compromise lenses - this particular Sigma is at the bottom of the super zooms.
That third shot is awesome. Could be the cover for Deadliest Catch dvd.
I don't really have many shots from rubbish lenses on my Flickr account. But I hate this lens for my 4x5 - Crown Graphic and Xenar 135mm f4.7 on Velvia 100. Doesn't cover 4x5 very well and very soft corners. Tried a few landscapes before figuring that out. Now I will never use it.
denoir wrote:
We've have a bunch of threads dedicated to great lenses where people show their best images. I thought that a thread with the reverse might be fun - favorite shots taken with crappy lenses.
Rule: The lens must be a removable one (to avoid the thread being overrun mobile phone shots). The lenses in question should preferably be lousy in some objective sense i.e not a high quality expensive lens that you happen to hate for one reason or another. Also no Holgas, Lensbaby composers etc - i.e lenses that have been designed to be optically rubbish in order to provide an interesting look.
I'll start.
My choice of lens is the abysmal Sigma 18-200 f/3.5-6.3 OS. It was my only lens for several years - before I got actively interested in photography. I wasn't quite aware of how terrible it was until I had tried a few better lenses. It suffers from just about every optical aberration known to man kind, the resolution is poor at all detail levels and completely uneven across the frame. The contrast is low and the colors are poor. Super zooms tend to be poor compromise lenses - this particular Sigma is at the bottom of the super zooms.
This is going to be hard, I don't keep crappy lenses for vary long, and that's if I manage to miss that it was crappy before taking it home.
Edit: 20N not 24N Doh!
MIR 20N 20/3.5 is probably my worst lens, muddy corners, CA is bad all over, the iris is not uniform, if it wasn't for the fact that it's a 20mm lens and kinda fun, I would have ditched it after my first outing with it.
denoir wrote:
My choice of lens is the abysmal Sigma 18-200 f/3.5-6.3 OS. It was my only lens for several years - before I got actively interested in photography. I wasn't quite aware of how terrible it was until I had tried a few better lenses.
Nice - shows that a 350d can produce striking images. However I'm going to guess the images have been 'saved' by processing. Curious what the out-of-camera images looked like - please post if you have the time.
Kevin, your guess is right - they have been post processed. How much I have no idea. Those are from the 'bad old days' when I shot JPEG only and did not save the originals. My PP was also very crude which shows in the images.
Here are a couple more - the lens although far from good, improved a lot at the tele end.
This is with the relatively unimpressive Sigma Filtermatic Fisheye 16mm. It's very good at around f/11-f/16, which is what this was taken at, but below f/8, it's abysmal...the center doesn't get sharp till f/5.6. But, if you need a cheap fisheye for full frame and don't mind stopping down, it'll do a good job:
LightShow wrote:
MIR 24N 20/3.5 is probably my worst lens, muddy corners, CA is bad all over, the iris is not uniform, if it wasn't for the fact that it's a 20mm lens and kinda fun, I would have ditched it after my first outing with it.
All you need to do is look at Flickr or RedBubble for a little while to see the (largely) excellent images (in between the crap pictures of peoples cats and dogs) being created with junk cameras and lenses. No, not Holgas or some such trendy camera or lens, just cheap DSLR's with the cheaper kit lens it came with.
Of course such equipment has it's uses and limitations, hence the existence of lenses that cost 10 times as much, and more.
Ideas and execution create great (or at least interesting) images, not equipment. Of course the equipment can screw up your best efforts too...
Here's one with a 10D (my first dslr and I'm still using it from time to time, for 8 years now!) and a Tamron 28-300 (my first lens for this camera, bought against better knowledge and only because my ordered 50mm prime lens took over 4 weeks to be delivered). It was disappointment on first sight, the pictures came out so soft and blurry that I already began to question my decision with the DSLR-move. But the prime lens easily changed my mind and I sold the Tamron after only 2 weeks of using it. This was the best picture in these 2 weeks:
