I'll save you the trouble of reading this review if you don't feel like it by saying: I love this lens and I'll recommend that you have one in your bag. Buy it here.This is not going to be a full review, just a few thoughts and a few pictures.
Ok, so basically this is the widest you should get for "normal" photography. There is a massive difference between 12mm and 10mm. I rented this lens for a recent wedding that I shot. I got this lens for several reasons: 1. The wedding venue is a large beautiful building with a very close fence surrounding it (see the little clipped google map), 2. weddings normally have groups of people in the shots and 3. I really wanted to fire a few off on this lens out before deciding to buy it.
Cons
There are a few cons to this lens. If you are shooting a full frame sensor camera, this lens will crop it. There is a lens this wide that is made for full frame sensor, but the reviews are horrible for it... but if you are shooting any prosumer digital SLR, this won't be a problem. You also have your normal distortion in the edges of the frame that you get with any wide angle, but with the 10-22, its not as much as you would expect. Its not a fisheye lens, so you don't get the "cartoonish" distortion that you would get looking through the peep-hole in a door... the straight lines seem to stay pretty straight. Try to avoid putting any part of a human in the corners of the shot as it seems to enlarge them; Instead, let streets, horizons, and buildings run off of the edge of frame.
Pros
I love this glass! Most of the cons happen when you are using this lens for something that its not intended to do. The issue to overcome in this shoot, as stated above, was that the fences caused me to need to be within several feet of the large groups of people that I was shooting. The main pro of this lens is that will very little distortion in angles, you can shoot a very wide subject without having to stand 300 feet back. From 10-20 feet, I was able to get some extremely wide shots that turned out great. I found the focus to be accurate and quick. The zoom ring is smooth. The minimum of f3.5 doesn't really inhibit you outside at all, though I'd imagine you'd have to throw some extra light around a bit inside. The curvature of the actual glass at the top of the lens doesn't protrude out so far that you can't use filters. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, but long story short: I'll be adding this glass to my bag as soon as I can put another $600 together.
This is with my back smashed up against the fence a few feet away.
A good example of why you should keep people out of the corners of the shot on the lower right and lower left. You can also see the extreme vanishing perspective... this table is a small round table and the people on the other side look dwarfish.
Notice the lines of the Temple behind him. There is only a slight magnification of the edges spreading the parallel lines apart, not the drastic distortion that you would expect.
Notice again the lines on the ground only slightly curving. I think it works really well with this shot.
This shot shows you the reason I needed this lens for this shoot as it was taken in very close quarters.
Another close quarters shot still gets the gold statue/capstone in the picture.
Small groups shots are possible from very close. I'm less than 5 feet away leaning against the fence.
I really like the effect of this lens on the ground tiles.
At 22mm. I took this shot again with a different lens, but I leave it here to illustrate some of the cons of this lens. The magnification at the bottom of this shot is unappealing. I think the rest of this shot looks great.
The planters are actually concentric circles, not distorted. An extremely close wide shot, the camera is 4ft from this group of sisters.
Thats all for now. I may do a review of the Tameron 28-75 that I rented for this same shoot, but I wasn't as impressed.
