Processing, Writing, and Researching

All this morning and part of the afternoon I worked on an article for my photo website.

The rest of the afternoon and part of the evening I looked a bit more at backpacks, Hotels for the Ukraine holiday, and also wide-angle lenses.

I read some people saying that the Tokina 11-16mm lens was good for using at 16mm on a full frame camera. But after doing some research, it seems it is mainly preferred by people who use their DSLRs for video. There were quite a few reports saying that there is some vignetting at 16mm and the corners are soft at every aperture.

Reading various forum posts, it seems there is not really a sharp wide angle full frame lens other than the Nikon 14-24mm and the Samyang 14mm. (Oh, and of course Zeiss UWAs).

Because of the issues I had with the last copy of the Samyang 14mm, I would really want to try it out in a shop before buying it, or at least buy it from somewhere that lets you return it for free if it isn't up to spec. Unfortunately Samyang only seem to have one official UK dealer, and they charge £300 for the lens. The price from Amazon is similar.

I also looked at the Olympus 18mm and Tokina 17mm f/3.5. The Olympus looks like it's not too great wide open, but reasonably good at f/8-11. The Tokina I didn't see any test crops, but some people said it was really sharp, others said it wasn't that good. The general consensus seemed to be that it was a decent deal for $100-150. Unfortunately (as always seems to be the case) it normally sells for much more than that on ebay.

I did try to find out if there was any difference between the ATX and the RMC version, but couldn't find any info. The cheap price and good reports I read were for the older RMC version. So I will add that to my ebay watchlist.

At the moment the only wide-angle lens I have is my Miranda 24mm lens, which isn't that great (at least at the edges). Unfortunately it looks like I won't have any better lenses in time for the Germany / Austria trip at the start of July.