What wide angle for architecture?

[Austintatious]

I am interested in photographing architecture. I have an SLR. Am I better off with a 16mm fish-eye,a 24mm or maybe a 17-28 zoom for this work?        
BTW, I am on a budget of course.

Thanks for any advice!
Charles

[P C Headland]

You don't specify what sort of architecture you want to shoot, but...

A fish-eye is generally not good for architecture.   You want a lens with as little distortion as possible, so a 24 or 28mm prime is best.  Zoom lenses typically have barrel distortion at their short end.

A tilt-shift lens is even better, as you can correct converging lines in camera, rather than at the printing/scanning stage.  These can cast quite a bit though!

[Austintatious]

Thanks PC,

I am just doing photos of the building boom in my town. For personal use, nothing that I will be "paid" for. So I will look for the primes you list. They will also cost less. I am shooting a Yashica FX-3 super 2000, so glass is reasonable for that camera. If I get lucky on the *bay, there is also Ziess !!!

Charles

[connealy]

Wide-angle lenses are particularly nice for dramatic interior shots where your ability to move around is limited.  They are best used where you want to capture the over-all character of the space, and emphasize converging perspective.  The nicest lens I've come across for this purpose was a 15mm Heliar on a Bessa L.  Here are a couple examples:

[Gene M]

I agree with Mike Connealy.

[Nick Merritt]

If it's for your own use, then converging verticals isn't that big a deal -- but as much as I like a 24mm, I think 28mm might be a better choice, assuming you have enough room to get the whole building in the picture.  To minimize the converging verticals, try to get a high vantage point (like maybe standing on your car?) and of course be sure to keep the lens parallel to the ground.

[Julio1fer]

In my limited experience a 28 mm is enough. Below 24 mm the perspective gets too unreal for my taste, although it may be useful for special purposes, just asMike Connealy said above. Same for fisheyes.

For many architectural shots you can get away with just a 35 mm.

Take a look at the techniques and software for panoramics and stitching - they may be useful too, maybe even better than an extreme wideangle lens.

Sharpness and low barrel distorsion are very important. Aperture is not important since buildings don't move much.

[ImageMaker]

I'll vote for 28 over 24, too.  Not least because you can get good 28 mm lenses that aren't extremely fast (say, f/3.5 instead of f/2.8 or faster) for very nice prices in most of the classic mounts.  I'm partial to M42, of course, but you can probably get an inexpensive adapter to mount M42 glass on that Yashica, too.  The Auto-Rikenon 28/2.8 and Super Takumar 28/3.5 are both very good lenses, plenty wide for anything other that interior shots in a trailer house, and shouldn't set you back too big a wad of bills...

[Raid Amin]

I recommend a 25mm or a 24mm lens as the widest to use to limit distortion and still get great coverage. Wider lenses would be special effects lenses.

[Austintatious]

Wow!
I would like to say thanks to everyone for all the great advice to my question.
Got both a 28mm and a 24mm on my watch list. Hopefully I will snag one for a fair price. I have a 35-70 zoom, but as was pointed out above, there is a bit of distortion with it. Will have one in a few days with any luck.
Thanks again to all of you!

Charles

[josphy]

If the 17-28 zoom isn't especially more expensive than the other two lenses you mentioned, I'd go with that.  You'll encompass both the 24mm and 28mm lengths but also have that ultra-wide effect when you want that.  If there's any danger of the zoom being a little less sharp than the primes, you'll probably be stopping down to at least f8 for architecture shots anyway, so that should be negligible I'd think.

I just think there are times you are going to want a REALLY wide angle, and 24mm just doesn't seem all that dramatic any more.

[Kin Lau]

There's quite a few 17-28's on Ebay in Y/C mount as new-old stock.

I have a 19-35 on my Minolta X-700 and a Vivitar 19/3.8 on my Yashica FX-3 Super 2000.

[Rick Oleson]

My approach has been a little different, though I don't do a tremendous amount of architecture shots.  I have always thought of the ideal as a shift lens to eliminate converging verticals, but I could never afford one for the sort of occasional use I had.  

I did find, however, that if I shot with a 20mm I could hold the camera level and still get the building in the picture.  It gave me a lot of extra foreground, which I cropped away for the final image.  A 20mm is more expensive than a 28 or a 24, but it's a lot cheaper than a shift lens and it will get pictures that the 28 or 24 won't get.  The disadvantage compared to a shift lens, of course, is a smaller image on the film since you're going to crop half of it away... but in exchange for that, it's cheaper and you can use it for other interesting stuff.

You can get 20mms cheaper than you used to be able to, in the form of the Russian MIR-20 which is a decent lens (although these are becoming in a bit more demand now from crop-format DSLR users desperate for anything that will pass for a wide angle.....)

[Per Bostrom]

I prefer a short tele, 100-135mm for architech shots. That is if there is room enough.

[Tom Hildreth]

If I were to get into architecture photography seriously, I would have to consider getting a shift-tilt lens. But then, I don't have any cameras with the required focusing screen that has the X-Y scribed lines on it. I would do all this right after I found a friendly loan officer.
 
Or I would shoot B&W and do it by tilting the enlarger during printing.
Possibly full-blown Photoshop can accomplish the same-maybe someone else to supply input on that.
 
We get so used to seeing convergence that many people don't recognize it. There is a local newspaper that does a "then-and-now" historical photo each week. Of course the oldies were shot with bellows type cameras with convergence corrected at the time of exposure. The "now" shots are all taken without correction, and it drives me nuts. I pointed this out to a couple of non-photographers. I think it's driving them nuts now also. (my job is complete).
 
I've been taking aircraft pictures for a long time, but some of the most impressive recent shots I have seen were taken at Vancouver by a night-shift worker with a bellows job. Nicely corrected convergence. Awesome difference, once you see it.