Home Forums Gear Photography More lens questions

I'm considering purchasing a couple of lens in the near future. I'd like to cover several bases so here's my questions. Is it possible to get a nice landscape lens that will also serve as a wide angle lens for family and group photos? Does the distortion at the edges make a landscape lens unsuitable for the group portraits? Which lens would serve best in this dual role?

Which route would be better for macro photography, buying Kenko tubes for my 70-200 2.8 L IS or a macro lens? I suppose the obvious answer is the macro lens but when I speak of macro photography I'm not talking bugs eyes...more like close ups of flowers and honey bees. For the money what's the best route?

Thanks for any and all advice or comments. I've found the information and help on this forum invaluable.

Jeff M.

on the first: it depends on how "wide angle" you're going to want. I have a 10-20mm and a 17-50mm lens and find I use the 17-50 9 times out of 10. The wider one will take indoor pics with fairly minimal distortion above about 15mm. The trouble you'll have is that fast wide angle lenses are pretty spendy specialized lenses and a good (reasonably priced)3.5-4.5 10-20mm is not that useful under indoor lighting.

IIRC you have an APS-C camera as well so you'll have to take into consideration the "crop factor" ie: you'll "lose" some of the advertised wide end.

I'm totally sold on the Tamron 17-50 f2.8 ($400ish). I think it will do a very good job at both applications.

For the macro. I dunno. Hopefully Ray will chime in on the tubes as IIRC he uses them to good effect and I suspect you'll do well with them.

If you want a lens for occasional real close up stuff, like bugs, etc, take a look at a set of close-up lenses. They often come in sets of 3 and just screw on the front of the lens, like a filter. Google "close up lens" and you'll get all kinds of info on them.

+1 on Utah's comment re: Tamron 17-50. I shoot Nikon, and I did a side-by-side with the Nikon 17-55 2.8, which is almost 3x $$$ as the Tamron. The images were shown to three other shooters and the camera store owner - they couldn't tell them apart. Heckuva lens.

welcome to the fire!