Post your ultra-wide angle shots

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STM

Senior Member
Well I got my 18mm AIS today but it has been pouring the past few days with a similar forecast for the weekend so I am not sure when I will actually get to go out and use it. It is in beautiful shape and the focus, like all AIS Nikkors, is smooth as butter.

Here it is on my rather dusty due to lack of use F4S. It is amazingly compact for a lens as wide as it is with a 72mm filter thread. The lens hood slips on over the outside of the lens, so you do not have to remove filters, etc. to mount it, a nice feature! Like all my lenses, I have a Hoya Multicoated UV on it. This one is of the "low profile" variety so it does not vignette the image

18mm-F4_zps2e29f421.jpg
 
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STM

Senior Member
Well the weather at the beach cooperated for just long enough that I could get one image with the "new" 18mm f/3.5 AIS. The sun stayed behind the clouds pretty much, but even with that and a 4xND filter and stopping down to f/22, an effective aperture of f/45 I could only manage 1/4 sec which was really not enough because I wanted to get the water to blur more. I plunked down the gear bag into the sand and straddled it and used it to support the camera. I left my 8x ND at home like a dummy and really did not want to stack a 2x and 4x ND together because it might degrade the IQ. There will be plenty of other opportunities. I set the lens at the hyperfocal distance for f/22 and it was sharp from about 1 foot to ∞. The starfish was just over a foot from the camera. I tried all black and white but the starfish ($1.99 at Alvin's Island, a really cheap prop!) just didn't "pop" like I wanted it to so I just used spot color. So far I am very pleased with this lens! I am really impressed with the sharpness and its ability to keep straight lines straight. I see great things to come with this chunk of glass!


starfishspotcolor1000.jpg






 
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STM

Senior Member
slowpoke said:
I like your thoughts on this shot,Scott.Thanks,gives me some ideas.
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Go for it!

I also have a beautiful 5" long spiny murex shell from Saipan where I was born and may re-shoot with that one too, but it is almost perfectly pristine, a real rarity for a shell like ath and I am afraid I might break off one of the spines.
 
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STM

Senior Member
This is an "almost, but not quite there" image I managed to get with the 18mm in between rain squalls. It is one of those which looked great through the viewfinder but kind of fell short once I opened it on Photoshop. The two hurricane fences provide great leading lines but they really do not lead to anything. Maybe a person on that small dune where they kind of meet would have worked. But I guess you can't win them all. Again, I set the aperture at f/22 and set the hyperfocal distance, which gave me about 1 foot to ∞ depth of field. The sharpness of this lens is superb.

hurricanefence_zps4e7278f0.jpg
 
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STM

Senior Member
One criticism, and it is not the only one by far, that I have of the new lenses out these days, and it is not just Tokina of course but with most everyone of them, is a lack of a depth of field scale on the lens barrel. With a lens of this short a focal length it is not that big a deal. But the way that lenses are made nowadays, you cannot set a manual hyperfocal distance to give you sharpness from a pre-set distance to infinity because you have no way of knowing at a glance what the depth of field is for any given aperture. With my starfish image using the 18mm AIS Nikkor, I simply set the f/ at f/22 and set the hyperfocal distance using the DoF scale. That way I did not need to focus on a specific object in the field and hope that the DoF would be enough to cover everything. With that focal length and f/ combination, I could tell at a glance that the DoF was from about a foot to ∞
 
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Blade Canyon

Senior Member
darrellforbes said:
Another one from the Maldives...I'm really liking these wide angle shots! 14mm, Rokinon....of course! :D
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Based on what I saw here, I ordered the Samyang version of the same lens from Adorama. Just arrived today, and that is one big hunk of glass. Of course, the second I took off that funky lens cap, my thumb went right on the lens. I'm looking forward to some big sky star shots, but tonight it's cloudy.
 
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PapaST

Senior Member
I snapped this pic this morning. I almost posted it in the ALMOST thread because if you look closely (in the dark clouds on the right side) you can see the reflection of a picture frame and blinds of the office I was in when I took this pic. But then I said... what the heck, I'm just a newb, who cares. Shot with my 16-35mm f4 (at 27mm, 15 sec, f6.3)


BM6_4312-2 by BMalinis, on Flickr
 
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