Not using W.A. lenses

[Bill_1856]

With so many people now printing digitally, and stitching works so well, I wonder if it's common to leave the wide lenses at home and just make multiple shots with the film/lens shifted?

[Kevin Crisp]

Well for me, it is hard to cut the prints and get them to line up perfectly when I take them off the drying screens. So I take the wide angle, much easier.

[Vaughn]

Won't be the same -- size relationships, etc.

[David R Munson]

If nothing else, I would find added scanning, stitching, etc to be a much bigger pain in the ass than carrying an extra lens.

[rdenney]

If I wanted to make stitched images, I would leave the whole large-format kit at home and buy a Gigapan for my Canon.

If I want something like a 4x10 panorama, maybe I would consider stitching two 4x5 images. But that would not relieve the need for short lenses.

And if I was stitching images made by using shifts, then it would have to be done with longer lenses to have the necessary coverage.

But I would much rather make single images of nearly all scenes, so that the time I press the button, and so that any effect of the time the shutter is open, remains consistent across the scene. Nearly all my photos have at least some movement in them, even if caused by blowing vegetation. And even if I hit an interval that has no movement, the same elements might be in a different position because of wind for the next exposure.

Rick "who uses short lenses far more often than stitching multiple images would be satisfactory" Denney

[ic-racer]

Why even bother with a lens, just do ray tracing if you going to make computer art.

[CP Goerz]

I find it easier to 'see' one whole wide image on the ground glass than to pan a camera and mentally stitch it before exposure.

[Edward (Halifax,NS)]

Stitching scares me so I will stick to one piece of film per image. If I want a panorama it is usually cropped from the middle of a 4X5 frame...until I win the lottery and get a 6X12 holder.

[ic-racer]

Well for me, it is hard to cut the prints and get them to line up perfectly when I take them off the drying screens. So I take the wide angle, much easier.

I'm not as concerned about that level of perfection; I believe that gluing or mounting or attaching the individual prints together by hand is a strong artistic statement!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v670/ic-racer/largephotos.jpg

[Greg Miller]

With so many people now printing digitally, and stitching works so well, I wonder if it's common to leave the wide lenses at home and just make multiple shots with the film/lens shifted?

This is great for when you want the perspective of a telephoto lens but the breadth of view of a wide angle lens. Keeping mountain ranges dramatic (instead of shrinking them (relative to the foreground) with a wide angle), for example.

It is just another tool in the bag to have for the right situations (or not). People can choose not to do it because it is too hard, but that just opens the door for others to get unique images.

[CP Goerz]

ic-racer....nice pics!

[E. von Hoegh]

With so many people now printing digitally, and stitching works so well, I wonder if it's common to leave the wide lenses at home and just make multiple shots with the film/lens shifted?

Not for me. As far as serious photography is concerned, I am 100% film/analog. I've made a couple spliced together panos from 8x10 contacts that are pretty good (read "stunning"), and the 90 on 4x5 is wide enough for any pictorial work I have ever done.

[cdholden]

Put that 90 on a 5x7. It gets even wider!

[ROL]

With so many people now printing digitally, and stitching works so well, I wonder if it's common to leave the wide lenses at home and just make multiple shots with the film/lens shifted?

"Common" – yes, I believe that word to be more appropriate than you may have anticpated.

[Brian Ellis]

I don't always use a wide angle lens to encompass a wide scene. I more frequently use it to alter near-far spatial relationships (e.g. to make the foreground "loom" as Fred Picker used to say). So while I do stitch panoramas fairly frequently - it's really very easy to do - for me stitching isn't necessarily a substitute for a wide angle lens.

[E. von Hoegh]

Put that 90 on a 5x7. It gets even wider!

But it leaves the corners dark.:(

Someday I'll get a real 90 that will cover 5x7. Also a real WA for the 8x10, say a 6 1/4 Wollensak.:)

[Mark Stahlke]

I don't always use a wide angle lens to encompass a wide scene. I more frequently use it to alter near-far spatial relationshipsI completely agree with this. Sometimes I use wide angle lenses to "push space into the photo". I think of it as the opposite of the so-called telephoto effect.

Here are a couple shots of, basically, the same scene. The camera position was changed by about 10 or 15 feet.

The first shot (http://www.markstahlkephotography.com/Enchanted_Forest.html) was made with a 125mm lens.
The second shot (http://www.markstahlkephotography.com/Early_Spring_Afternoon.html) was made with a 55mm lens.

I'm sure you'll agree that the second shot has a much more open, spacious feel. It's partly due to the different compositions but the biggest difference is a result of the lens choices.

[rdenney]

Remember that it is the camera position that dictates perspective, the lens focal length that governs the magnification, and the choice of format that governs how much of the scene is included in the frame. A change in magnification does not provide a change in perspective, and accurately offsets a change in format. As long as the camera doesn't move, a 45mm lens on 35mm render the same perspective and include roughly the same scene as a 150 on 4x5.

But a more relevant example to this thread is this: A 90 is a wide lens for 4x5. But it's a long lens for 35mm. Let's say you make 5 images on a 35mm camera using a 90, and then stitch them together (with rectilinear correction). That might give you a panorama that is 1.5" tall and 5" wide at the film plane. You would get exactly the same picture using a 90mm lens on 4x5 and cropping off the top and bottom 1.25", leaving a 1.5x5" portion of the 4x5 negative.

We mess up, I think, when we talk about how short and long lenses change perspective. They only change what portion of the scene we will see from a given camera position. We could look through a paper-towel roll and see the same telephoto effect without any change in magnification or perspective at all.

Rick "noting that stitching is effectively a change in format" Denney