Very, very impressed by the Canon 8-15

rowlandw wrote:

Interesting - your reason? The 11-24 is out of my league but I've mulled over getting the 8-15.

Well, I got a 17-40L when I was shooting my 10D. It was my standard zoom (no EF-s at the time). It wasn't very wide so I bought the Sigma 15mm fisheye. When I got the 5D+24-105, that became my standard zoom and the 17-40L became my rectilinear ultrawide. I thought I would never use the fisheye on full-frame. But it didn't work out that way.

As you get wider and wider, it becomes harder and harder to find subjects that don't looks really crazy in the corners when shooting fully rectilinear. I think the cutoff is around 16-18mm before things start to get really tough. Some of the DPReview 5Ds examples, many of which were shot with the 11-24, show this problem. Like this one:

And this one:

Look at the stuff in the top and top corners.

So, I got a little tired of shooting messed up looking shots like those with the 17-40L. Some things are fine, a lot of things aren't. Like this one:

Looks a lot better in fisheye projection, don't you think?

The more I shot with the fisheye, the more I got used to it. The more I got used to it, the more I liked it.

The more I liked it, the more I shot with it.

On the last major vacation I went on, I shot 42% of my shots with the 15mm fisheye on full-frame.

And I even crop and defish a few of them.  With the 8-15, I can do that a lot more, and use it just like a rectilinear ultrawide in the 14-24 range.  I could use it all the way to 11mm equivalent, but like I said, I don't really like those shots, usually.