Landscape photography is my serious hobby (addiction)..................Money is not the prime concern. In order of preference IQ = most important, 2nd/3rd is wider/versatility, and last is speed because it is for landscape.
Following your own logic I would say your best option is the 17TSE. I am sure if you learn to work with tilt and shift and creative possibilities of this, it will add more depth to your photography. There is a reason why so many landscape photographers worked and work with view cameras and tilt and shift the image producing optical systems of lens and media/sensor. A zoom may be versatile, but in most situations is not very necessary for landscaping. Inside or in small rooms zooming with the feet is not always possible. That is where the zoom comes in. Group shots indoor, interior photography, indoor architecture, weddings and receptions, etc. Part of good landscape photography is carefully choosing a point of view which is going to change of you learn to imagine/previsualise how a point of view works with a tilt and shift application.
From the lenses mentioned I have the Samyang, but I am not really very much into landscaping. This is why I bought the budget solution. It is as great as the best lenses except for distortion, which is a complicated moustache type of distortion. Still this is easy to postprocess with a Lightroom/Photoshop plugin or a PTlens correction. Add 25$ for a license of PTlens and you have better picture quality than Canon\'s 14mmL and that well reputed Nikon 14-24 zoom. As a budget solution it\'s a no brainer. If you want it better than that and hate the post processing you\'ll have to go less wide and take the 17TS or a Distagon 21mm. Money is no objection you said, but be sure you want to pay a lot more for the less wide Distagon that is better in it\'s correction for distortion and maybe a tad better correction of field curvature, but everything else is the same. No AF either. The 17TS gives that same image quality (though different character) but adds that creative extra of tilt and shift. To me it would be the choice between the Samyang and the 17. And why not both of money is no objection? You could start with the 14 and see if you like it. You would find out if the FOV of a 14mm is really what you like. I would not be surprised if you found out that you would also like to have a 24mm, which is much more my personal favorite for landscapes. I find 17, 14 whatever belove 20mm really specialist lenses. Dramatic, much more complicated to control and a great distance between close subjects and infinity. Maybe that\'s what you\'re after, but give it a thought. Have you made an analysis of your must used settings of the 17-40 by researching your exif info? I would not be surprised if you found out that it\'s often a little less wide than you think. We seem to remember those situations where the extremes lack. So in this case, the situations where your 17 wasn\'t wide enough. But we often forget all those photos that are made intuitively without feeling any constraint by the lens. I bet you use the 17-40 more often around 20-28mm than you might have thought.
Lots of words to make you think again. But as I said in the beginning of this post, following your own logic it can\'t be hard. If your logic is right, buy the 17TS and start a new direction and add the dimension of the rules of Scheimpflug to your passion. Have EOSfun !
Nov 24, 2011 at 06:01 PM
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