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A question I often get, usually from people just starting out in photography, is “what’s your favorite lens?”
The majority of my photos are of wildlife captured using my very large, very heavy and very expensive Canon EF 600mm f/4L, so most will assume that’s my favorite lens.
They’d be wrong. It’s one of my two favorites lenses. The other is the least expensive … Continue reading
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Night traffic moving in Times Square, New York City.
Reading room in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The view of the towering arches of the main hall of Union Station, the historic train station in Washington, D.C.
Traffic waits on The Mall before passing through Admiralty Arch toward Trafalgar Square, London.
Vessel is a 150-foot-high art structure of connected staircases between the buildings of Hudson Yards in New York City.
A rose honors the memory of a victim of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. The rose was inserted in a letter of a victim's name engraved in the bronze panels surrounding two reflecting ponds at the memorial site.
Sunrise behind the Pineapple Fountain in Charleston Waterfront Park, Charleston, S.C.
A quiet moment at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.
A sign on a lamppost shows a drawing of the Eiffel Tower adjacent to the actual Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.
30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, shown at dusk, towers over the flags that surround the ice skating rink in Rockefeller Center.
Steps exit a tunnel carved through rock, Hocking Hills State Park, Logan, Ohio.
The interior of Trinity Church, located on Broadway at Wall Street in New York City. The church building, completed in 1846, is the third on this site.
Worshippers light candles inside Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, France.
Viewing an arched hallway inside the New York Public Library, New York City.
The chapel inside The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in Bampton, Oxfordshire, England, is illuminated by light filtering through a stained glass window.
Visitors walk inside a corridor in St. Barbara's Cathedral, Kutna Hora, Czech Republic. Construction began on the church in 1388.
Waiting for Amtrak in 30th Street Station, Philadelphia.
Visitors walk inside the giant atrium of the Oculus, the centerpiece of the World Trade Center transportation hub in New York City.
A statue of Thomas Jefferson stands in the center of the chamber of the Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C.
A quote from "The Aeneid" by the Roman poet Virgil spreads 60 feet across 2,983 blue watercolor squares in the Memorial Hall of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City.
Visitors line up to tour Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, France.
Plants in the Enid A. Haupt Garden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., brighten the walk to the Smithsonian castle.
Sunset behind Empire State Building and skyline, New York City.
Looking up at the Texas Capitol dome from rotunda floor, Austin, Texas.
Skylight in the roof of Guggenheim Museum is framed by the spiral walkway, New York City.
Looking down the spiral staircase in the Trustee House at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Ky.
Looking up toward skylight from under a spiral staircase, Hotel Monaco, Washington, D.C.
Cubed Curve sculpture and buildings, Sixth Avenue and W 50th St., New York City.
A dense crowd of people always surrounds Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France.
The Marblehead Lighthouse stands on the edge of Lake Erie in Marblehead, Ohio. The lighthouse was completed in 1822.
Overcast sky and buildings reflected by the reservoir in Central Park, New York City.
Sailboats are anchored in San Diego Bay.
and lightest lens I own: the Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM, an ultra-wide angle zoom lens used to capture all the photos in this gallery.
I know that seems odd, citing as one of my favorites a lens that cost a fraction of what I’ve spent on any of the other lenses I own. But the reason is simple: The 10-22 allows me to capture scenes that no other lens I own can do.
A number of my lenses, like the 600mm I use for wildlife photography, are designed to bring distant objects up close. I can use those lenses to bring a distant bird close enough to see feather detail or an athlete close enough to see the drops of sweat on his or her face. The 10-22 does just the opposite: It makes close objects appear more distant. The extra-wide view makes it perfect for capturing city scenes or landscapes in areas where the surroundings make it necessary to stand close to the subject (for instance, in areas where backing up a few steps would put me in the middle of traffic or off the edge of a cliff). I can shoot the inside of a large room, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. That makes it great for capturing the inside of a church or the main concourse of a train station.
The diagonal angle of view at the 10mm (or widest) setting of the lens is more than 107 degrees. That’s just a little less than the field of view of human eyes. For instance, if you stand and look straight ahead at a scene, just about everything you see — from the edge of your peripheral vision all around — can be captured in one image by a camera using the 10-22 zoom at the 10 milimeter setting.
But there are other capabilities of an ultra-wide angle zoom that make it fun to use.
First, the depth of field (or depth of focus) of an ultra-wide angle lens is greater than that of other, longer lenses. Translated from photo language to normal language, that means a much deeper area of the photo will be in focus. In landscape photos and interior architecture photos, this can mean that just about everything in the scene, from foreground to background, will be in focus. That can make for a nice photo.
An ultra-wide lens also tends to magnify the distance between objects. That makes it easy to use an object in the foreground as the focal point of a photo while still capturing the surrounding “atmosphere” — for instance, my photo of the rose placed in an engraved name on the World Trade Center memorial.
A downside, though, is that a small tilt of the camera creates significant perspective distortion. Parallel lines will appear to converge and objects will look like they are falling backgrounds. That’s not a good thing if the goal is an accurate, realistic photograph of a scene. But that same perspective can be used artistically, to provide a sense of height or scale.
I have a broad collection of Canon L series lenses, including the 600mm I use for wildlife photography. The L series lenses are Canon’s top-of-the-line, expensive professional lenses that use the highest quality glass and robust design to produce superior image quality. And I use these lenses whenever I can.
The Canon EF-S lenses like the 10-22 are much lighter, less expensive, and less durable. The lenses are designed to work only on Canon digital SLRs with a “cropped sensor” (APS-C sensors, which are a bit smaller than the full 35mm-size sensor). My cameras all have APS-C sensors, which allows me the flexibility to use either the L series or S series lenses.
But as I’ve explained, it isn’t the price, weight, or quality (or lack thereof) that makes the 10-22 my favorite to use. Instead, it’s the type of scenes I can capture with the lens.
Although I do admit that the lightweight is appreciated during long hikes through the woods or walks in a city.