All the photos in this post were shot on Fuji Neopan 400 pushed to 1600, with my Minolta SR-T 303b and Vivitar 25mm f/2.8.
I decided I'd finally take some advantage of interchangeable lenses and get a wide angle lens for the Bessa, but first I needed to see if I know how to handle one. The 50mm is super nice for capturing people and the things they're doing, but not so much for giving a feel for where they are and what they mean.
Grover taught us that near things get big and far things get small. The wide angle lets you get even closer to things while keeping them in frame. With longer focal lengths, you need to take a step back to get everything in. This is different from standing in place and zooming in and out, because the closer you get to something, the more exaggerated the "near and far" effect becomes. If you're say, 3 feet away from someone shooting wide, that person will be huge compared to someone 8 feet away -- a difference of only 5 feet.
If you're shooting long at someone 30 feet away, compared to someone 35 feet away, the size difference will be much less pronounced, even though they're still only 5 feet from each other. You actually change how big things are and where they show up in your composition by moving your feet like Grover did, and not by zooming. Zooming crops the image, so something that shows up twice the size of something else will still be twice the size after a zoom.
I started out on digital point and shoots, which tend to run on the wide side so people can take big group pictures and stuff, but I wanted to see what it was like through a viewfinder. My dad gave me some extra accessories along with his SR-T 303b, and the 25mm Vivitar f/2.8 was among them. It's not particularly sharp or good in any way, but it does the job.
I think I've mentioned this before, but it'll be more relevant for this post: while the wide angle does get you in closer, it also means you have to be closer, otherwise your subjects will get lost in the frame. This may get you spotted, but another advantage of wide angle lenses is that you barely even have to have the camera pointed at people to have them in frame. To them, it looks like I'm taking a picture of something off to the side. Most of the people who saw me thought I was photographing something across the street, and looked behind them to see what it must have been.
And finally but not least, because of the near-and-far thing, wide angle lenses get you more perspective lines, which is why you'll see a lot of them in architecture. These are great for carrying people's eyes around the frame, but at the same time, if you're sloppy with them, they could lead people's eyes right off the edge of the frame, which you don't want.
Anyway, I have a Voigtlander Ultron 28mm f/1.9 on its way in that should arrive within the week. I'm looking forward to posting the resulting photos from it.
For lack of anything to sign off with, here is a cat.
