Which Canon Fast Wide Angle Lens?

I am interested in doing more night sky and aurora photography even though I am geared for bird and wildlife.  I am using 2 7Ds now and will be going for the 7D IIs.    I have a couple of wide angle zooms but they are, of course, slow.

Which Canon lenses would you recommend?

Eleanor

What focal length are you looking for?

Hello Eleanor,

It depends a lot on what kind of scenes you want image. Some like ultra wide to get most of the sky. But very short focal lengths do not record many stars (aperture is more important than f/ratio). I prefer smaller fields of view and use a 35 mm f/1.4 lens (aperture diameter 25 mm). Compare that to a 20 mm f/2.8 lens which has an aperture diameter of 7.14, thus collects over 12 times less light from a subject. Regarding lenses, the best moderately wide lens available today is the Sigma 35 mm f/1.4 art lens (about $900). Canon's lenses are not great wide open, but might be ok on a crop sensor. Sigma will hopefully come out soon with a 24 f/1.4 with their winning optical formula.

Please see my multi-part series on night photography: http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/nightscapes/

Roger

I have a Canon 17-40 and a 28-135. From looking at the auroras I tried this fall I think something between a 14 to 28 would be wide enough.

The difference between 14 and 28 is incredible.  I think you need to narrow it down more but in that range here are the best lenses for Canon:

Ultra Wide - Zeiss 15mm f/2.8
Extra Wide - Zeiss 21mm f/2.8
Wide - Zeiss 25mm f/2
Moderate wide - Sigma 35mm f/1.4

But of course the 25 and 35mm lenses are not wide at all on your 1.6 crop cameras.  If you want a fast zoom that covers your focal length regime, the Canon 16-35 f/2.8L II is your only option but the new Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 may end up being better than the Canon.

Canon wide and fast primes aren't that good.  All of the Zeiss lenses are manual focus.

One more to consider is the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 AT-X 116 Pro DX Autofocus Lens for Canon APS-C DSLRs. I bought and used the Nikon equivalent on my Nikon 1.5 crop camera for a trip to photograph the Northern Lights, something I am not planning to do many times (ie. it is lighter and cheaper than the Zeiss lenses).

You can see the results of my attempts on my flickr site:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/60519499@ ... 3071437645

Maximum f-stop is pretty important for aurora photography because to capture the "curtain" effect you need to keep the shutter speed as fast as possible. Another possibility that is very reasonably priced is the Rokinon 14mm f2.8 and their 35mm f1.4. Those lens compare favourably to the brand names and won't break the bank. There are lots of reviews on these lenses.
If you want to do night photography, as in wide field images of the milky way and so on, these little gadgets are great for compactness, price and ability to track the earth's rotation so you can do longer exposures.
http://www.kwtelescope.com/home/vixen-p ... acker.html
http://www.kwtelescope.com/skytracker-w ... -5150.html

The Samyang/Rokinon is awful in the corners wide open and has lots of comma too - not good for astro stuff although the sensor crop does mitigate this to a significant extent:
http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Revi ... &APIComp=0

E.J. Peiker wrote:The Samyang/Rokinon is awful in the corners wide open and has lots of comma too - not good for astro stuff although the sensor crop does mitigate this to a significant extent:
http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Revi ... &APIComp=0

Cropped camera isn't not too bad and the price is right 

Lenstip is, in my opinion, the best site to compare lenses especially for astrophotography. For example, compare these 35 mm f/1.4 lenses:

http://www.lenstip.com/170.7-Lens_revie ... atism.html

http://www.lenstip.com/297.7-Lens_revie ... atism.html

http://www.lenstip.com/359.7-Lens_revie ... bokeh.html

The Canon is just horrible. The Samyang pretty reasonable, the Sigma really quite good.

Roger

Yes but those are all 35mm which is more like a 55mm field of view on a 7D so not a wide angle at all

Super and thanks for all the feedback! It will take me a while to go over all of this. It really is the curtain effect I would like for auroras as the ones I got in northern Quebec with my current lenses are just green and black! The exposures required spoiled the results.

I see they still make the Sigma 20 1.8. More expensive than I remembered it.

I am not sure what you mean by the "curtain effect", but to make the pictures more interesting, it is nice to have some of the foreground (a lake, a building, etc) and as much of the sky lit up by the aurora. I found that even with the Tokina at 11 mm on my 1.5 cropped Nikon, that was a struggle (I was always cutting part off). So at least for photographing the aurora (the night sky might be different), you should really stick to a very wide lens or switch to a full frame camera.

ricardo00 wrote:I am not sure what you mean by the "curtain effect", but to make the pictures more interesting, it is nice to have some of the foreground (a lake, a building, etc) and as much of the sky lit up by the aurora.  I found that even with the Tokina at 11 mm on my 1.5 cropped Nikon, that was a struggle (I was always cutting part off).  So at least for photographing the aurora (the night sky might be different), you should really stick to a very wide lens or switch to a full frame camera.

They are actually moving so if you are using long exposures to record them, like 30 seconds, you just see a wide smudge of colour with no detail or vertical lines("curtains").

Thanks Scott.  Maybe I was just lucky but I could shoot most of mine under 15 seconds (I even shot a bunch under 10 seconds) with the Tokina f/2.8 (I did crank the ISO to 1000).

OntPhoto wrote:I see they still make the Sigma 20 1.8.  More expensive than I remembered it.

It is absolutely awful.  A terrible lens for this sort of thing as you need to get to f/5.6 before it's even remotely useable for points of light.

rnclark wrote:Lenstip is, in my opinion, the best site to compare lenses especially for astrophotography.  For example, compare these 35 mm f/1.4 lenses:

http://www.lenstip.com/170.7-Lens_revie ... atism.html

http://www.lenstip.com/297.7-Lens_revie ... atism.html

http://www.lenstip.com/359.7-Lens_revie ... bokeh.html

The Canon is just horrible.  The Samyang pretty reasonable, the Sigma really quite good.

Roger

E.J. Peiker wrote:Yes but those are all 35mm which is more like a 55mm field of view on a 7D so not a wide angle at all

EJ,
My point was not these specific lenses; it was to show the variability in lens quality.  A star test is the toughest test of a lens.  A fuzzy bar chart doesn't really tell us what is going on.  A star image shows all the details.  It is an exceptional lens that produces nice round star image to the corners, regardless of focal length.  The lenstip.com site is excellent for showing this information.  Before buying any lens for night/astro work, I check lenstip.

Roger

rnclark wrote:

rnclark wrote:Lenstip is, in my opinion, the best site to compare lenses especially for astrophotography.  For example, compare these 35 mm f/1.4 lenses:

http://www.lenstip.com/170.7-Lens_revie ... atism.html

http://www.lenstip.com/297.7-Lens_revie ... atism.html

http://www.lenstip.com/359.7-Lens_revie ... bokeh.html

The Canon is just horrible.  The Samyang pretty reasonable, the Sigma really quite good.

Roger

E.J. Peiker wrote:Yes but those are all 35mm which is more like a 55mm field of view on a 7D so not a wide angle at all

EJ,
My point was not these specific lenses; it was to show the variability in lens quality.  A star test is the toughest test of a lens.  A fuzzy bar chart doesn't really tell us what is going on.  A star image shows all the details.  It is an exceptional lens that produces nice round star image to the corners, regardless of focal length.  The lenstip.com site is excellent for showing this information.  Before buying any lens for night/astro work, I check lenstip.

Roger

Don't disagree but also don't want to confuse Eleanor either since she asked specifically about wide lenses

Having tried northern lights in Iceland I can attest to having as much light as possible. My 24-70 2.8 allowed reasonably easy manual focus with live view. My 17-40 f4 was a much darker world. On a 7d or 7d2 I would be looking at 16-35 2.8 or zeiss 21mm. Canon 20mm 2.8 is also ok if you want to save money. I found shooting at f4 or f5 ISO 800 with 4-6 sec exposure was ok. Depends of course where you are shooting from.