Advice for landscape beginner

The are my most used ranges so whichever I get, I'd be looking to add the other in good time. But of the two, 24-70 is my most used lens in all my photography - and as said, you can stitch images together to achieve the same angle of view you get with the wider lens. I think the only reason interchangeable lens cameras don't have pano facilities built in is to encourage wide angle sales. The tech in point and shoot/phones would be very useful in my main cameras as I photograph many a pano but rarely bother to stitch them back together.

I find that I shoot the majority of my landscape shots with the 16-35mm. You can really exaggerate the "near/far" relationship in a scene and capture dramatic vistas without stitching scenes together.

Both, really. Cost may not allow that, but those two focal length ranges are very popular among landscape shooters - and they are very useful indeed.

But hold on, you may be in luck. Sony also offers the FE 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS - billed as the cheaper Alpha 7's kit lens but still sold for $500, which is less than half the price of the FE 24-70mm f/4 OSS. I went over to DxOMark.com and opened up a comparison between those two on an Alpha 7R, and found something pretty interesting:



At 70mm @ f/8, center sharpness is pretty much equal, but the corners are quite a lot sharper on the $700-cheaper lens.

Oddly enough, the 24-70 appears to sharpen up nicely at f/11. I'm starting to suspect that something went wrong in their testing, as it's not as sharp at f/8 as it is at f/5.6 and f/11. Pretty weird, not typical at all.

The 28-70 isn't as sharp at f/11, and stopping down all the way to a whopping-for-standard-zoom f/36 is borderline useless - you get deeper depth of field, but everything that's in the depth of field will actually look out of focus. That's an exaggeration, but still, such a narrow aperture should be avoided.

At 50mm differences are rather minor - both lenses perform admirably well, as far as sharpness goes, at both f/8 and f/11.

Both lenses aren't great with distortion at the wide end, but that's overlapping with the 16-35. At longer focal lengths, both have pincushion distortion - more so on the more expensive 24-70 than on the $500 28-70.

You get the overall tone here. You can go to that comparison and see for yourself: The 24-70 is worse in some respects, sometimes better, but never is it $700 better in my opinion. Get yourself both a 16-35mm f/4 ($1350) and a 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6 ($500) instead of debating between the 16-35 and the 24-70mm f/4 ($1200).

Great answer, very detailed, thanks a lot.

A further question: Would the (very sharp) native 35mm prime do the job of the 16-35 if I stitched all my shots to get the field of view? What would I sacrifice by doing that?

Cheers

When you shoot for a panorama, you may encounter parallax errors. To avoid them, you have to find the entrance pupil of the lens and rotate around it. It's obviously very difficult to perform handheld. The best way to do so is with a special-duty panoramic head on a tripod. (There are many other panoramic heads, including high-end models from Really Right Stuff, but this Panosaurus seems like good value. I've never tried one, or any other panoramic head for that matter, so you'll have to do further research if you're interested.)

Shooting for a panorama and stitching it later is time consuming, much more so than dealing with the already large files the Alpha 7R produces.

I've shot several panoramas, two of them are my two absolute favorite photos. But they were all shot with a zoom lens, at its telephoto end. The goal I had wasn't to get a wider shot than the lens allowed, but to get a high resolution image at a ~ 3:1 aspect ratio. So I don't really have any experience shooting panoramas for simulating a wider lens.

I use Canon but know the a7R is a full frame body. I'd vote for the 24 or 28 to 70 because it's considered a "normal" lens and if you shoot anything other than landscapes (such as family) this is the focal length you need.

I mostly shoot landscapes with a full frame Canon and the 24-105 and 17-40 are my lenses of choice.

Kent

I agree with KENTGA, I prefer my 24-70 mostly. Have the 14-24 f2.8 but that lens is usually too wide.

I personally think that 16-35mm is a more useful zoom range for shooting landscapes. Currently I do not have a lens that goes wider than 24mm equivalent and I do find instances in which I wish I had a wider lens, but usually I can work around it.