Advice requested please: I want to get the missus a fisheye or wide angle lens for her digital Cannon EOS. But these are a tad expensive, so I'm looking for your input and help.
Can anyone
1) recommend which is better to go for out of the two in terms of effects and versatility? (I realise this is personal preference but all views welcome!)
2) is there anywhere in Basel or nearby in (e.g.) Germany that sells second hand lenses (I don't trust buying second hand on the internet, although if you know different...)
3) can you recommend anywhere where I could get a relatively cheap lens?
4) any lenses you can recommend that are not Cannon branded (but (obviously fit a Cannon body)?
Hello, I would looove a fish eye myself and seriouslyn plan to buy the ready made ones they seel now in "funny" shops, often decoration shops or alternative ones..it s quite affordable, they do as well the diana...
I would personally go for a wide angle rather than a fish eye but that is purely because that is the kind of photography I enjoy. To me a wide angle lens can be used for landscape, indoor wide scene, architecture and also extreme wide angle close up photography. I would love to have a fish eye lens to but I would definately get a good wide angle lens first.
What kind of photos does your wife take? What other lenses does she currently have. Look around for camera shops, here in Zurich there are quite a few shops that also sell used lenses. Also what camera does she have? If it's one of the 1,6 crop sensors then Cannon, Tamron, Sigma and Cosina make nice extreme wides +-10mm to 25mm.
Not sure that is what the OP is looking for. That is a add-on lense that fixes to the front of your current lense. The problem with these is if you look at the pictures on the advert you will see severe vignetting in the corners. More expensive but MUCH better to get a proper fish eye lens. But you can see why fish eye lenses can be fun to play with.
Yep I agree this is a cheap and dirty solution. But it might be a worthy one for a trial period .
I am on the same boat as Carlos' but trying to find a cheap, second hand EF Macro. I've been keeping an eye to see if I can catch a real bargain in eBay, but for months I have had zero success.
In my opinion the screw on lenses are not so a bad idea if you want to play around, but it is not realy usefull for everyday photography. There are also lenses available which look like filters and reduce the focal length.
There are also compact fixed lense, wide angle cameras available.
More usefull is a propper 2,8 20mm lense (full frame) if you are into wide angle photography. In my opinion you will not get around of a full frame digital camera if you want to get good digita results. Why dont you think about buying a 2 hand anolog kamera wide angle lense set and start with this.
A good place for second hand lenses in Basel is Marlin, across the road from Migros at Bankverein. They're really good, most of the staff speak English and have a huge selection of lenses.
In fact, a lot of us in the Basel Photoclub seem to get our kit from there
Thanks all for your comments & suggestions - we need a thanks button here...
Regarding what camera & what photos (in reply to Nelly_Da_Hefferlump) - I think it is a 450D 8Mpix (quite old - at least 5 yrs I think). It came with a "standard" lens and a zoom lens to 50-200mm (?). I also bought her a sigma macro lens (1:1).
She likes taking landscapes (mountains, valleys etc.) and close-ups of flowers.
Well, after much um'ing and ah'ing I've gone for the Canon EF-S 10-22mm.
827 CHF from http://www.tagespreis.ch/ ... Hopefully the order will arrive in time for the Mrs' birthday. Basically a similar price to the Sigma lens on digitec.ch (the Canon is 850 at digitec). I followed up with a phone call and had the order confirmed with a chap who was happy to speak English (always a bonus!).
Marlin were good, but the price there was 998 CHF and as for Photo Wolf in town, they tried to convince me that the discount they had from ~1500 to ~1350 CHF was a good deal
Although I sold my 40D a year ago (as the prices all went up, so after 1.5 years of ownership I got all my money back even selling it second hand) I researched wide angle lenses from here :
And was going to buy the Canon lens you've just got.
I found I wasn't carrying the dSLR around as much as I'd like, in fact I'd leave it at home when I went on holidays to eg Asia. However good the camera, the photos don't come out well if you leave it at home
Now looking at the Canon S90 or the (bigger) Samsung EX1.
However, that 10-22mm lens is fantastic and a friend's copy is tempting me to give SLRs another go ..