I’m not a big fan of the fact that my pictures have no depth – no depth of field, no foreground, no background. I don’t care whether you take a picture of a window pane or a brick wall – it all looks the same. It isn’t the subject matter, it’s the way we perceive it. Sometimes this is fine, other times it’s not.
I believe that, at the end of the day, the best photography is done with a camera that has an aperture that is as wide as possible – at least as wide as the lens. The way I shoot my pictures is that I find a wide lens and then do the math to find the right aperture to make sure that the depth of field is as good as possible.
One of my favorite images is “Gatorade bottle” by Michael Lassen. It’s a very wide lens and the depth of field is great, but it doesn’t capture the bottle as it is. It’s a great example of a wider aperture camera (I shoot with Nikon D40) and not a wide one (my Canon with 30-300mm f/4.5-5.6).
The fact is that a wide aperture lens is actually less “wide” than a normal lens. A normal lens captures a lot more of the subject’s shape in the image. A wider aperture lens captures a lot more of the subject’s surroundings, making it look wider. I know this is controversial. It’s a very popular lens in Canon’s lineup and most of the lens reviews are still looking at the same ones.
It’s more than that. Wide apertures look wider. It is also more difficult to focus in them because they are wider. The wider aperture lens just captures more of the objects in the scene.
Wide apertures on Canon cameras are known to be very sharp. Wide apertures like the Sigma 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G are also known to be very sharp. The wide apertures are wider and thus more difficult to focus, so a normal lens is a good general rule of thumb.
The Sigma 18-135mm f3.5-5.6G is the widest aperture lens available from Sigma. It has a minimum focus distance of about 6 feet, so it is not a bad general rule of thumb. It’s also probably the most common lens you will find on dedicated Canon DSLR cameras. A good general rule of thumb for wide apertures, especially when you are on a wide body camera, is to use a zoom lens.
A good rule of thumb for any lens is to avoid focal lengths over about 6 feet. Lenses that are over 6 feet are too wide and have a very sharp edge that is difficult to focus, and often makes them unusable. That being said, the Sigma 18-135mm would be right at the borderline to do that. Its focal length is about 5.6 feet, which is a good general rule of thumb.
I’m sure if you put a camera on a tripod, it would work better. In reality, you don’t even need a tripod for it to work. It’s just that any camera on a tripod will have a smaller depth of field than a wide body camera. And when you are shooting wide, it’s easy to get confused between what is being shot and what is a background color. So to make sure this doesn’t happen, I recommend using a camera with a wide angle lens.
The problem with a wide angle lens is that it will also distort your depth of field (you cannot only shoot wide but also shoot at an angle). The solution to this is to use a camera with a wide angle lens. But, you dont need a wide angle lens. You can use a wide angle lens like a fisheye lens. This is the type of lens that is normally used to take long exposures of a subject being moved around on a screen.
