Architecture and how to take pictures of it

[rebeccajones]

I'm going to "that" London in a few weeks time and from the sounds of it I'm mostly going to be taking pictures of the Architecture, so I was thinking this is a good excuse to buy a wide angle lens..

I was thinking of getting the Sigma 10-20 mentioned in a pervious thread, but I was wondering:

1) Am I right in thinking Wide Angle Lens?
2) is the 10-20 actually a Wide Angle Lens?
3) Anyone recomend any other Lens?

Thanks,

[John C]

An ultrawide will help you get the whole of a building in where you couldn't otherwise (cities are a bugger for this, unlike the countryside where there tends to be more room to move around). It will, however, give a lot of perspective distortion, which isn't everyone's cup of tea.

My chosen lens for this sort of stuff is the Tokina 12-24 f/4 - sharp, with great colour rendition and contrast. Some examples are <a href="http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=tokina+12-24+f%2F4&w=31726387%40N00&s=int">here</a>.

Be sure to take along a standard and something in the short telephoto range (for street shots and picking out architectural detail resepctively).

[raymondlin]

Its a great excuse to get a T/S lens !

[Tastydirt]

The Sigma 10-20mm has very good control of distortion, better than the Tokina and Nikon 12-24mm, but lacks edge sharpness so it's upto you which ones more important. Personally I go for sharpness first as distortion can be corrected later in post processing when you can never add in more detail.

BTW the Sigma 10-20 is as wide as you can go on digital without going fisheye, which may not give you the effect you want for architecture!

[rebeccajones]

The Sigma 10-20mm has very good control of distortion, better than the Tokina and Nikon 12-24mm, but lacks edge sharpness so it's upto you which ones more important. Personally I go for sharpness first as distortion can be corrected later in post processing when you can never add in more detail.


How would you go about fixing the distortion? Is it like some batch software I can run across a bunch of pictures or is there some manual process?

I've been looking at the example pictures that are posted on the other thread about the 10-20 and I'm really not sure what I'm looking at in terms of edge sharpness.

[RobDickinson]

Theres photoshop plugins etc for fixing distortion and IMo a wide/utrawide is ecxelent for architectural snaps.

To do it properly you realy need a T/S lens but that takes a lot of time per shot and expensive.

[Tastydirt]

I use DxO to fix distortions, it does it automatically based on your camera/lens combo (if it supports it, check first).

Web sized photos don't really show sharpness that well, you'lll need a 100% crop of the corner to see the sharpness issues, perhaps PuddleDuck will swoop in and supply the pictures as he has before?