The spot is a favorite of mine since we moved to the area between Orting and South Prairie. The group of trees to the right are interesting from multiple angles, and I have especially liked how they look hanging over the river.
But this was a different viewpoint with a different kind of lens. Usually I shoot with a wide angle fairly close to the water, but there was a small group doing dog training and I held back and figured they might look good in one of the shots.
The lens was very sharp in the center, good halfway out to the edge, and there was no avoiding it; pretty awful at the sides and in the corners.
Here’s a crop of the center to show how crisp the details are there:
For an extreme wide angle, this is actually good performance. It is sharper at the center than I would expect, holds up well in the central ¾, and falls apart dramatically at the edges. (I cropped the edges, mostly to get good framing, but on the right edge I had to remove a part of the image I would have liked to have kept.)
Technical info: Canon TS-E 17mm f/4.0 lens, a tilt-shift wonder similar to the 24mm version I used last week. As before, the tilt shift is not useful with medium format cameras, but it is basically a more-affordable lens for a medium format system, with the same wider-than-35mm coverage (image circle of 67mm).
The camera was the Phase One IQ3 100 digital back in the Cambo WRS-5000 camera.
As long as one can live with the limitations, it’s really a very useful lens. I’m just not sure the price is justified for medium format, with those terrible edges. Here’s a crop of just the lower right corner. At upper left, we see a decently sharp area. But the image really gets bad fast as you move down and to the right.
The elongation of the dandelions is something one more or less expects in ultra-wide angle lenses, so not complaining so much about that. It is the softness at the edges and in the corner that are disappointing.
As a 17mm lens, it is about the equivalent of a 10mm lens in medium format. However, with the lost edges, it loses a good chunk of its effect wide-ness. I figure it for about a 22-24mm lens in 35mm terms, or about a 14mm medium format lens. There are very few good medium format lenses at 14mm, so it’s still a very useful lens. And this is a used copy; I rented it for a week for testing to see how I like it. It’s possible that a new 17mm lens might perform better. I’m going to look at some examples on Flickr.com.