Canon 10-22mm Wide Angle Review

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.

LensRentals.com Review

I recently shot a wedding that required me to have a wide angle lens. It was at an LDS Temple, which are beautiful buildings. The one in Fresno, CA doesn't have a lot of room around it to get back far enough to get the whole building in the shot without a wide angle. I would normally rent from a local shop for the weekend and wouldn't have a problem.
This particular time, I was in the middle of moving from California to Idaho. We had all of our stuff in a uhaul trailer in the parking lot of the temple as I was shooting the wedding. Well, for a variety of reasons, this situation caused some problems with what I would "normally" do.
I started looking on line for a Netflix for cameras or something. I came across a few sites that offer various things, but one really stuck out. www.lensrentals.com claims to be a photographer's co-op. All the proceeds of the rentals go into news lenses and camera bodies. Thats all fine and dandy, but what I was really interested in was getting the lenses in good condition, on time and for a good price. I needed the lenses for the 22nd, so I ordered them to show up for the 19th. You have two options with lensrentals, you can choose a date to have them ship to you or you can just ask to have them ship the lens when it becomes available. I reserved two lenses for 7 days starting on the 19th. I received the package at work (you need to sign for it, it ships UPS) a week early. I emailed lensrentals just to make sure that I wasn't going to pay extra and got a response within an hour that they are just paranoid and knew I needed the lens for an important shoot and wanted to get it there early.


So even though had the lenses for two weeks, I only reserved them for a week and only paid for a week. I rented the Canon 10-22mm and the Tameron 28-70mm which I will right reviews of later. They showed up in a small box packed with what seemed to be memory foam. Each lens had a carrying case and the wide angle had a lens hood. Shipping both ways is included in price and they even enclose a return address label in the package. In total the cost was $88. This seems like a lot of money, but truly, its not. I had two lenses for 14 days. This is $3.14 per lens per day including shipping. On top of that, renting certain lenses that you aren't going to shoot on every day makes a lot more sense than buying them (espesially the "L" series lenses they offer). I've also heard my friend lament that he wishes that he would have rented his macro lens before buying it. Even though the reviews all gave 5 stars, he hates that lens and dropped a grand on it. I'll be renting any lens I'm thinking of buying from now on... and since I'll be in the middle of nowhere Idaho, I'll probably do that with LensRentals.com.

Their selection is fantastic for both Canon and Nikon shooters. They have the lenses categorized in helpful groups like tele, standard, wide, macro, etc. "Roger" also adds his two cents on some of the lenses, which is helpful if you don't feel like searching amazon or bhphoto for reviews. They even have rack mounts, ball heads, camera bodies, pocket wizards, and other randomness.

All in all I found the service to be fantastic and quick, the prices to be reasonable and the website/ordering process to be very straight forward. I will continue to rent from them for some time as I am moving to an area of no real photo shops.