My 18mm Zeiss is an essential part of my camera kit. Of course it all depends on your style of shooting, but I don't think I could exist without an UWA lens. This question seems a bit silly though. It is like saying you don't think lenses longer than 300mm are worth using. Every focal length or angle of view has it's place.
As for the argument about the quest for corner sharpness in UWA lenses, here is my take on it. When I shoot landscapes I try to transport the person into the scene and make them feel like they are there. When the eye looks around, it generally sees everything completely sharp unless you specifically focus it on something really close to you under low light. In most of my wide angle shooting I try to remove as much of the camera or lens from the image especially in the forms of lens flare and soft corners. The more consistent the image is corner to corner, the more I am transported to the scene in the photograph.
Daniel Heineck wrote:
At least for most applications, do we really need anything much wider than 24mm (or equivalent FOV on a crop sensor) ? Most photographs shown on the entire forum using wide angle lenses are architecture and landscape, primarily.
......
I'm genuinely interested in peoples opinions on this one.
My opinion to this topic is that it depends quite a lot what you shoot. Majority of my subjects don't need ultrawide lens, actually I don't even own wider than 17mm and it's not that wide in 1DmkIII.
When I need ultrawide I can often stitch a panorama but haven't yet shoot a lot of that kind of panoramas since I just received my panorama head, and I can't get the photos to stitch well without proper panorama head. This is because when I shoot ultrawide I prefer to have some foreground subjects with subjects on background as well.
For me personally depth of field is always very important and often I find the ultrawide "all in focus" photos pretty boring unless it suits the subject of photo. Therefore in some cases panorama's lack of depth of field is asset and on other cases it prevents you to get the shot.
As an example this photo I took last week on my father's workshop would look about the same if I have used 12mm lens in fullframe camera and then cropped horizontally. The photo was shoot with Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 2/35 @ f/11, 20 shots, 4 rows, 5 columns:
In order to achieve similar depth of field and resolution I would have needed 12mm ultrawide lens which is corner to corner sharp at f/4 (or somewhere there) with 110Mpix fullframe sensor.
General misconception is that taking photos as panoramas somehow flattens the effect of wide angle distortion. This depends completely what projection is used to render the final image of panorama image. Typically very wide single row panoramas are rendered using projetion called "cylindrical" which leads to photo which doesn't have the same impact as real wide angle image. If people base their opinion to these photos then they will have problem that they think all panoramas are like that. Below are two projections of the above photo in different projections, first one in spherical projection and second one cylindrical - in both the wide angle effect is smaller (as well as the curved horizontals don't fit to this technical scene)
