I haven’t bought a new camera lens in more than three years, but heading to the big open vistas of the West, I couldn’t resist. I stopped into a little camera store in Casper, Wyoming, that turned out to be a great little camera store. The manager worked with me to find a quality wide-angle lens and adapter for my Sony A7 that was in my price range (and well below what a straight Sony wide-angle would cost). I left the store excited to try it out.
Here’s one of the first things I shot: Oxbow Bend in the Grand Tetons. There’s no way my other lenses would have captured that big a view, although this image is actually cropped a bit down from the original size.

There’s a learning curve to a new lens, especially one not expressly built for your camera. This one has an electronic adapter that lets lens talk to camera, so it can do manual or auto-focus and the camera automatically displays the lens settings as I’m composing the shot. (By contrast, my old Minolta lens with adapter doesn’t do any of that, and so photos with that are more a “hope I got it” and then check the monitor after the shot to see how things turned out.)

By the third day, I’d gotten better at using the new lens so I walked out onto a mostly dry creek near my campsite and had a little fun with the light and clouds. Some in-camera settings, some post-processing work and I like how it turned out.

How much can a wide angle lens distort? A lot! That’s the Grand Tetons way back there in the center of the image below.

This new lens is gonna be fun! Stay tuned because this winter in the desert will be a whole new way for me look through my viewfinder.
View life through a wide angle lens attitude and see your horizons broaden.
Stephen Richards