Best architecture/ landscape lens?

BaymaxFan78

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Joined
Mar 10, 2019
I want to buy or rent a new lens for the opening day of SWGE and I want to take tons of pics of the land. I'm not sure what lens is the best.

I have a canon ef-m mount but I can get an adapter to use ef lenses.

I have seen some zeiss lenses that dont zoom but take great photo but are very expensive.
 
I want to buy or rent a new lens for the opening day of SWGE and I want to take tons of pics of the land. I'm not sure what lens is the best.

I have a canon ef-m mount but I can get an adapter to use ef lenses.

I have seen some zeiss lenses that dont zoom but take great photo but are very expensive.

the "best" ?
depends on what lens you already own, price, focal length, distance to subject, available light, and whether you plan to use the lens for other things

a couple of suggestions -
Canon EF-M 18-150mm f/3.5-6.3 IS STM
Canon EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM
the adapter is cheap ($25) so you could also use Canon EF and EFS lens like the 10-18 and/or a longer telephoto like the cheap 55-250
or if it's at night something like the Sigma 18-35 f1.8

www.flickr.com/photos/mmirrorless
 
Last edited:
the "best" ?
depends on what lens you already own, price, focal length, distance to subject, available light, and whether you plan to use the lens for other things

a couple of suggestions -
Canon EF-M 18-150mm f/3.5-6.3 IS STM
Canon EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM
the adapter is cheap ($25) so you could also use Canon EF and EFS lens like the 10-18 and/or a longer telephoto like the cheap 55-250
or if it's at night something like the Sigma 18-35 f1.8

www.flickr.com/photos/mmirrorless
I probably should've specified that haha
I only have the basic 15-55 lens. I am going to buy the 18-150 once I get enough money. But for now I think it's a good rental option
 
I forgot to say I plan on using it for architectural stuff outside in the daylight and inside. Probably at night also so good low light.

The only problem is it doesn't come with a hood which is something important for the daytime shooting.
 


With EF-M native, 15mm is almost wide as you can go, and that basic kit lens will do a surprisingly good job with it. That's 24mm equivalent, about as wide as you can go without needing special wide angle technique and practice, and lens corrections can take care of straight lines in your raw converter du jour. You'll be at f/5.6 or smaller anyway for landscape type photos, so a fast aperture won't matter much if at all.

You could pick up an 11-22, but that becomes tricky to use. Another choice would be to go with a 17mm tilt/shift lens on an adapter (which will give stellar results). Both of those options require a lot of practice to get right though, and it's debatable that you'll get much better out of them. For SWGE, remember that the sightlines were developed in conjunction with Nikon, which means nothing is designed for wider than 18mm DX, which is about 17mm on Canon APS-C.

In short: the lens is you want is probably the one you own already, but short of that, the 11-22mm is your best bet before you get a massive jump in cost and difficulty level.
 
Yeah, if there's any concern about $$$, 11-22 is the way to go. But if you are going to be doing architectural work, a TS-E is pretty much a must have.
 
I forgot to say I plan on using it for architectural stuff outside in the daylight and inside. Probably at night also so good low light.

The only problem is it doesn't come with a hood which is something important for the daytime shooting.

the Cannon 11-22 is a better choice for architecture, the 18-150 is a good "all rounder"
--- and for wide(r) you could take a couple of shots and merge them as a panorama
www.flickr.com/photos/mmirrorless


2 shot pano by c w, on Flickr
 


Thank you guys. Is a Canon 6D Mark ii good? I emailed the rental company and they recommended that.
Or the EOS R? It has really nice specs but is an entirely different mount that i'm not used to.
 
The R, EF, EF-S, and EF-M are all different takes on just about the same mount. They all lock lenses on the same way and have the same basic communications protocol between lens and body, their primary differences come down to lens coverage (full frame vs crop) and flange distance (to account for the mirror box). Adapters from R to EF and EF-M to EF/EF-S are widely available.

With a full frame camera such as the 6D Mk II or EOS R, you get two big advantages:

1) Another stop of low light performance and shallower depth of field (an f/4 lens on a full frame is equivalent to an f/2.8 on a crop sensor). This also means that with the same f/2.8 lens, the full frame body will have 1/2 the high ISO noise (ISO3200 on a crop sensor looks about like ISO6400 on a full frame).

2) Wide angle lenses (in terms of the same field of view) can be made more easily and more cheaply all else being equal, especially on the long flange DSLR mounts

And that's about it. Some FF cameras have higher megapixel counts, but those two really don't by enough to be meaningful. They are both highly capable cameras, but are those going to be an advantage to you?

The DSLR mounts do have much deeper and broader selections of lenses, but that has more to do with the age of the mount. Nikon, in particular, has somewhere above 500 current and past first party lenses that work fine on their better cameras, and Canon has about 200-ish, and that's not counting third parties with thousands of lenses, especially for the F mount dating back to the 1960's. That advantage isn't negligible, but it's also not something that should affect you at SWGE. Using a 180 degree circular fisheye with perfectly corrected astigmatism and coma designed for Antarctic astrophotography just isn't a useful capability for 99% of shooters.

I have both a full frame and a crop body, and the crop body definitely gets used more, even with somewhere like SWGE. I'd pack my crop body, 12-24 f/4, 16-80 f/2.8-4, a fast prime, and some sort of telephoto (probably my 105 micro), and not worry about it. If I can't get the shot with those lenses, I would need something highly specialized and the learning curve on those is tremendous: realistically, I'd need to purchase the lens in order to get proficient enough to take photos with it that are better than I can get already with my existing lenses and software corrections (you can perspective control non-PC lenses in software, with some loss in resolution).

And I have over two dozen lenses in my stable: an 11-22 that you know how to use is going to give far superior results to a full frame body with 17mm tilt shift that you're not familiar with.

If you want to rent, you would be better off renting to get a faster or better lens in a focal length range you already know how to use on your existing body than to rent an entirely new from scratch system. A 70-200 f/2.8 is a great candidate for that, or an f/2.8 wide angle when you already own the slow one.
 
Thank you guys. Is a Canon 6D Mark ii good? I emailed the rental company and they recommended that.
Or the EOS R? It has really nice specs but is an entirely different mount that i'm not used to.


The Canon 6D is good but if your WDW "Star Wars' trip is a couple of weeks away just use your current gear and rent or buy a different lens for a different perspective. Don't sweat it.

The Canon R or RP mirrorless is also good and it easily use DSLR lenses with a simple adapter EF, EFS, etc. and mirrorless is much more versatile and flexible but leave that for another trip when you have more time to adjust to a different "full frame" model

www.flickr.com/photos/mmirrorless
 
I would second a 6DmII. It is a full frame sensor. It may not be Optimus, but definitely more than meets the eye. But you have to get into lens comparisons against APS-C sensors like on a 30/40/50/60/70/80 D model. Canon lenses are designed to cover a 24mmx36mm area basically (more to it than that but you get what I mean). The same lens on a crop camera is only seeing part of what is coming through the glass. And a FF sensor is 2.5X BIGGER than APS-C. Meaning individual pixels are bigger, collect more light, and work better at higher ISOs.

ALL other things being equal, any Canon FF sensor will capture better aspects of an image than a smaller sensor. And you won't fix most of that in PP either. There is a ton of info on the 'tubes about this.

Of course, this assumes you have the glass to leverage a FF sensor. But they truly are worth it.
 
Of course, this assumes you have the glass to leverage a FF sensor. But they truly are worth it.
And that's the crux of it. I'd also add: Glass and experience, the most important part of the camera is the 12" behind it and all. ;)

With good, fast, glass on a full frame sensor the images can just pop, but unless you're renting the L glass along with it, or shooting at a high enough ISO*, the contrast, edge acuity, noise, and sharpness is about the same between APS-C and full frame. Without those lenses, consumer lenses are much of a muchness between full frame and APS-C. Oh, and to actually get that extra L lens performance, you have to be faster than f/6.3, otherwise physics comes into play.

*High enough ISO depends on the sensors in question for a direct comparison: in the case of the 6D Mk II versus the M50, the 6D Mk II only pulls ahead at ISO640 and higher when the third sensor gain level kicks in, and is clearly ahead at ISO2500 when the fourth gain level kicks in. This also depends on how much is visible: though my DX are at all ISOs outperformed by my FX body, it only becomes visible in images above ISO1000 or so to me using my PP techniques, your tolerance will vary.

Also, only Canon has a 2.5x size difference, Nikon and Sony are about 2.2, but it comes out to about 1 1/3 stops and about 1 stop - much less significant than most people think.
 
Thank you guys for all of this knowledge. Another camera I've been looking at is the Sony a6400 with a 18-105mm lens. This whole time I originally wanted the Sony A7iii but that's too expensive. I've been hearing that these 2 are similar in a lot of ways (except for the crop sensor vs full sensor) and the a6400 is way cheaper. Does it sound like good camera?
 
It is similar, except for the crop sensor, and it is a good camera.

But... what does it buy you that your current EF-M mount camera doesn't do? 1/2 of a stop of dynamic range and a few FPS? At the price of worse ergonomics, having to move to a new lens mount with lower performing native lenses with QC issues? And adding IBIS, but removing the superior in-lens IS? You have to ask yourself: is it really worth it?

I'm going to give you the short answer: if the FPS or extra dynamic range are what's holding you back photographically right now and you've pushed your current gear to its limits, then it might be worth it, but you should still look first at the latest Canon models to stay in the system, and you should also consider Nikon and Fuji as well. If you haven't reached that point yet, it's definitely not worth it.

(And, yes, Sony's professional lenses have quality consistency issues as bad as Canon's cheapest consumer ones, and performing IS near the optical center is always better than IBIS of the same generation, which is why it's built into Sony's good telephoto lenses)
 
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Thank you guys for all of this knowledge. Another camera I've been looking at is the Sony a6400 with a 18-105mm lens. This whole time I originally wanted the Sony A7iii but that's too expensive. I've been hearing that these 2 are similar in a lot of ways (except for the crop sensor vs full sensor) and the a6400 is way cheaper. Does it sound like good camera?

yes, if you believe the sony camera and lens will get you better pics then buy from B&H/Adorama, they offer a 30 day return policy - makes it easy to compare camera gear.

And if you determine a full frame model will be the best choice for you be sure to consider the cost of lens - it can add up.
www.flickr.com/photos/mmirrorless
 

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