Looking to purchase new Nikon prime lens for landscape work. Primarily to be used for pano work. Suggestions Please. Good glass only

Currently use 17-55, 70-200

I am a Canonite, I don't know the Nikon lenses, but I would add an important fact to the question: if it is for a cropping camera. Some lenses, which are excellent on cropping bodies are not sharp enough at the edges of an FF body; I guess this is true re Nikon lenses as well. Corner to corner sharpness is a must for panos, everything else is negotiable.

50 1.4 cheap and sharp

S

This doesn't answer the original question and I trust it doesn't veer too far off topic, but in my experience you have two choices - find a lens of the right focal length that will give you the image you desire, or find a way to make an interesting photograph with the lens you DO have. The second option takes more creative skill. To overstate the obvious, a 50mm lens will provide a much different image than a 100mm lens. Both can be valuable in landscape work, but it's up to the photographer to decide what's interesting...

Mike.

He wants the lens for panoramas.

http://www.zeiss.com/C12567A8003B58B9/Cont...125711B005A77C4

I've heard of the quality of the lens. What focal Length?

50 (well actually 52.3 or something) is the lens that distorts and image least

So that is the ideal tool for stiiching

Longer lenses are great too just being a 'section' of the view of a 50

But a 50 is not very wide and say you want to cover 180 degrees it will be a lot of frames

Wider lenses than 50 require tricks by software to make a stitched file becuase of the distortions inherent in projectiing a wide image on a flat plane

But software is great nowadys

I would get the longest lense that will give you the angle of view that you want in as few frames as you want to take - maybe 3 or four max for a spectacular panorama

So maybe a 28 used upright

IMO prime lenses are best and the carl ziese glass excellent, but regular nikon glass is great too and you get AF !



S

And your point would be?



That was the point I was making. A panorama made in Arizona and a panorama made in the Rockies will be very different. Wide angle lenses, as Sam pointed out, can bring in their own challenges with view distortion. Really long telephotos bring their own challenges. But lenses, (assuming 35mm FF), in the range of say 35mm to 120mm can provide a good base for panoramic photos. It depends on where you are, what your subject is, and what you want to say.

Mike.

That I couldn't (and still wouldn't be able to if your original post was my only rossetta stone) figure out how what you were saying related to panoramas.

Thank you for clarifying.

AF 35 mmf2.0 would be my recommendation, although its flare behaviour is not that great.

Cheers,
Bernard

Just a thought.... wouldn't a 50mm or longer optic with a panning tripod gizmo introduce the least distortion for panos? Any wide angle effect would seem to add more work to the process. I try to look at this process optically and also avoid what was mentioned already regarding loss of illumination and sharpness in the corners of many wide angle lenses.

The Nikkor 50/1.8 is about as good as they get for sharp images - the AI sell for so little too. The 35/2 AI is also well above average, as is the 105/2.5 AI and 135/2.8 AI.

I think there are a few questions you need to answer before picking the lens.

1) How many images do you want to stitch together (5, 15, or 45)?
2) How many pixels do you want to have when you are done? (put another way, how large do you want to print the image?)
3) What field of view do you want to shoot? 30, 60, 90, 180, 360 degrees?

If you want to get 360 degree panos with as few frames as possible, get a very wide lens, even a fisheye (stitching programs have no problem dealing with these images). If you want to make ultra-high resolution images that will cover an 8'x10' wall at 240 ppi, then you need a very long lens to capture all those pixels.

I shoot panos using a 17-40mm, a 50mm, and a 70-200mm lens. My largest has been 87 images stitched together, and I frequently make images with only three images stitched together.

Try doing some stitching with your current lens. You will quickly get an idea of your preferences.

Two more things to consider:
Wide angles have lots of sky and foreground that can be boring in panos.
If you see a scene you want to frame in a particular way, a prime may not give you a choice about how many images to use. Zooms are fine for panos.

If your not in a hurry the 35 shift PC and 85mm T/S lenses are fantastic for stitching.

Some like the 28mm PC but I find it has a hair more CA than I like, but if you have the D3 or D300 it has auto CA removal that works very well.

manual everything,

Bob