Sony a55 & Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 panorama Test : My Mistake Of Always Using Wide Angle Lens

I just wanted to share with you one of my favorite "mistake", as some people would call it, of always using wide angle lens. When I first started taking photos, it was more a by-product of my travels. I mean my main concern was the journey to see new places and experience new things. Whenever I pulled out my camera, I was not trying to capture the best pictures, but  I tried to capturing the moment of being there. For example, if after a two hour trek I find myself standing at the top of a cliff overlooking the vast ocean below with 180 degrees view, I want to capture the feeling of being there, being able to look around to see the whole scenery. As a result of this, I was always using the widest angle to capture the largest field of view possible, whether I was using a compact or a DSLR or whatever I had on me. I don't think the zoom button on my compact cameras were ever pressed, and almost 100% of my shots taken with the Sony a100 kit lens was taken at its widest zoom range.

Obviously this does not result in the best photographs. I think this is because the bigger your field of view, the harder it is to find sceneries that are beautiful all the way through from one edge of the photo to the other. I mean standing there and looking around you might think that the view is perfect, but when you capture it into still photograph form and that is all you have to look at, every single little detail starts showing up.

So the next time you have a beautiful landscape in front of you, don't always automatically reach for that wide angle lens. Try lots of variations, you will be surprise at how well Telephoto lens perform at taking landscape photos. This is because it can "zoom in" on the best parts of the scenery, cropping out the bits that might ruin your composition.

Emm...the photo above wasn't taken with a wide angle lens. I just thought I would add it in because it fits with the "wide" theme :). It was actually taken with the a55 using the panoramic photo mode, where you pan the camera across and it will take several photos and put them together to create a panoramic photo. You might notice the birds in flight in the shot. It was actually just one bird, but as I was panning the camera across the bird just happened to fly into the shot. So when the camera took multiple shots to create the panoramic photo it also took several pictures of the bird at different stages of it's flight.