[Leica] wide-angle lenses

[Guy Bennett <gbennett@club-internet.fr>]

>Marc James Small <msmall@roanoke.infi.net> wrote:
>
>> And I simply fail to understand the frantic love for
>> wide-angle lenses, other than that they radically distort
>> the background.
>
>And as for some of the shots, sheesh.  Nearly all the wide
>angle ones hope to cover up their compositional laziness by
>the gee-whiz distortion...

lugnuts,

i once again find myself playing the devil's advocate. while my favorite
focal length is the 'normal' 50mm, i do own and enjoy using wide-angle
lenses. in addition to the summicron 50, i currently have the summicron 35
asph and the elmarit 24. among the nikon wide-angles i own are the 35, 28,
and 20. while i do find wide-angle distortion unpleasing, and try to avoid
or minimize it whenever possible, i do feel that, used intelligently, they
can create images of tremendous impact without necessarily crying out 'this
shot was taken with a wide-angle lense!'

to my mind, the wider focal lengths seem to be most useful for two kinds of
shots - on the one hand, drawing attention to a dominent foreground element
while emphasizing its spatial relationship with the background and, on the
other, giving a sweeping 'vista' type shot, a scene seen from a distance
including a vast amount of visual information, i'm sure they can be used to
great purpose in many other instances and for many other reasons. to use a
wide-angle indiscriminately (and this is true of all focal lengths, in my
opinion), for any and all shots, would be, in my opinion, irresponsible,
demonstrating a lack of esthetic judgement, or indicative of staking out a
single photographic terrain (like hcb) for which a single focal length is
deemed most appropriate.

to use a musical metaphor, you could say that the various focal lengths are
like the different stops of an organ, or the different members of a single
family of instruments (like the sopranino, soprano, alto, tenor, baritone,
bass saxophones, for examples). while i might not tire of listening to
charlie parker play just the alto sax, i am glad those other horns are
there, and enjoy them every bit as much. they broaden the spectrum of what
it is possible to say with that particular voice.

guy