Happy Mother's Day! Happy Father's Day! Happy Graduation! Photo.net has great photography gift ideas for the Mom, Dad, or Grad in your life. Shop for camera bags, lenses, DSLRs, and more...
Clubs, bars, and small venues are the places where most concert and live music photographers get their start, the reason being that there are fewer restrictions since the performers are less likely to...
As the digital camera market has grown, the number of digital camera
accessories on the market has grown exponentially.
Typically, when a dedicated photographer dips their toe into the "digital"
waters, they start with a prosumer camera like the Canon G3/G5, Nikon 5000/5400,
Sony 717, Olympus 4040/5050, etc. These are great cameras with plenty of manual
features that give an experienced photographer all the control he or she would
want. However, since most of us came to digital after using a film SLR for some
amount of time, one big drawback of the prosumer cameras quickly rears its head:
limited zoom range.
Now don't get me wrong, the average 35-135mm (some have more, some have less)
35mm-film equivalent is not bad. I would venture to say that a LARGE percentage
of the world's great photographs have been taken with lenses in this range.
Still, most photographers wish for a bit more, especially on the wide end.
My story goes like this. I took a three-month working/vacation trip through
Europe in the spring of 2002. Due to the actual photo work I was doing, I had to
haul along my dSLR, five or six lenses, flashes, and my laptop. This was all fine
and good, but it made for a heavy bag to haul all around. So when I got home, I
decided to start looking for a smaller camera that would let me travel a little
lighter and still take the images I wanted. I ended up getting a Canon G2; the
price was right and it takes great images. But so do all of the cameras in its
class. The G2 just happened to be what I ended up buying.
After a few months of using it as a throw-it-in-the-backpack camera, I
realized that I was always wishing for a wider lens than the 35mm of the G2.
Being a Leica nut, I have a great appreciation for the 35mm field of view, but
sometimes it just doesn't cut it. Canon makes a fine .8x wide-angle conversion
lens, which gives the G2 a 28mm wide lens. But it is large and expensive. Also,
being a younger photographer, and one who shoots in the extreme sports, wide
angle doesn't even start for me until at least 24mm. So I was looking for
something else. Sony makes a 0.7x conversion lens for it's 707/717 cameras, which
would have given the G2 a 24mm lens. But again, it is quite large (being built
for the 707/717's lens diameter) and quite expensive.
After searching around for a while in the wonderful world of the internet, I
started seeing some posts about Tiffen Megaplus lenses. I found that there were
.75x wide angle and 2x telephoto lenses available. Now while Tiffen is a fine
company, I'd never been real keen on third party screw on lenses for still or
video cameras (excluding the fine Century video lenses). But I thought I'd give
two of these lenses (the 0.75x and the 2x) a try.
Some General Tiffen Megaplus Info:
As far as I can tell from Tiffen's poorly designed web site, there are four or
five lenses in the "Megaplus" line:
0.56x wide angle
0.75x wide angle
1.3x telephoto (maybe?)
2x telephoto
Close-up set
The lenses come in various thread sizes, 37mm and 43mm being the most popular
(these cover a lot of cameras). Tiffen also makes the various adapters that
different cameras need to attach conversion lenses. There is an out-of-date
comparison chart on Tiffen's website at
http://www.tiffen.com/digital_MegaComparison.htm
. Tiffen is also pretty good about answering the phone if you call them at (631)
273-2500. You can read Tiffen's
Megaplus Press
Release which gives a lot of marketing speak as to why their lenses are so
great. It also points out the price range that these lenses are in, $30-$90,
which is significantly less than lenses from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, and Sony.
0.75x Wide-Angle Lens
Of the two lenses I received, this was the one I used the most. It measures
2.75 inches across and just under 1.5 inches tall. This is quite small as far as
wide-angle lenses are concerned. The coating looks like any other current vintage
lens coating, a nice blue purple. The lens weighs about half a pound and fits
easily into a small camera bag pocket.
The lens came with front and back caps, but one of the spring clips on the
front cap broke just minutes after I took it out of the package. The metal
(aluminum?) Tiffen lens adapter screwed on as easily as the Canon or Lensmate
adapters (and is priced a lot cheaper).
I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of this lens. Remember that
anything that you screw on to the front of your lens is going to degrade the
image somewhat. That having been said, sharpness seemed to be quite good with the
.75x attached. It was a little less sharp in the corners, but not enough to be
noticeable with most subjects. The 4x6 Frontier prints that I had made of my trip
to Cuba looked very good. And I have no doubt that 5x7's would be equally
pleasing. Larger 8x10's would probably be fine as well, I just don't make many of
them. Color rendition was good and flare was reasonably controlled. This lens
doesn't come with a hood, but you could probably make one fairly easily. The 24mm
focal length isn't too wide for a hood to be effective.
If you look at the photo of the orchid, below, you'll notice that there is
some serious ghosting around the first orchid in the background. And even a
little on the in-focus flower. This was the only time I noticed this problem. But
it was bad enough that I could see it even on the G2's LCD. Now in the lens's
defense, I was in a very hot and humid greenhouse at the time. So that may have
had something to do with it.
You can zoom partially through your camera's zoom range
with this lens and still get a decent image. But I would only do that in a real
pinch. Even the best add on conversion lenses really start to look horrible when
you try to zoom in with them on. After all, it is designed to be a wide-angle
lens. Macro focus works down to 1-2 cm, which is pretty cool.
2x Telephoto Lens
Not being a long lens kind of guy, I didn't use this lens as much as I used
the 0.75x.
Like the 0.75x, the 2x comes with front and back caps. Though this time the
front cap's spring clips were broken before I even got the package open. Tiffen
needs to pay a little more attention to quality control on this issue. Though it
isn't that big of a deal, as new lens caps only cost a couple of bucks.
The 2x lens is a bit larger at 2.75 inches across and 2.25 inches tall. It
weighs 9.35 ounces. Unlike the 0.75x, the 2x lens can only be used at full zoom
(on the G2 anyway). Otherwise you get an out of focus round image with black
borders. Sort of like a telephoto version of a circular fisheye.
Image sharpness seems very good across the frame. Color rendition and contrast
doesn't appear as good as the wide-angle lens, but that may just be a personal
opinion. And a lens hood might help the contrast issue. A neat feature (at least
on my G2) is that with the macro button turned on, you can still close focus down
to about 3 feet even with the 2x lens on.
With 2X Megaplus
Without
One nice thing about both of these lenses is that their 67mm front thread lets
a lot of people use their existing filters. I was able to use my 77mm Nikon
Circular Polarizer on the .75x with no vignetting.
Neither of the lenses affect the balance of the camera very much (though the
2x is worse in this regard) nor are they so large that they intimidate subjects
more than usual. The Canon wide lens for the G3 is an extreme example of both of
these. The thing is huge and unbalances the camera terribly, and staring at such
a huge piece of glass has an unnerving effect on people as you try to photograph
them, especially if they don't know you.
Would I buy these lenses myself? Sure I would, they produce fine images and
they offer a great price-to-quality ratio. Can you get better quality out of a
Canon or Nikon lens? Probably. But at some point you have to ask yourself a few
questions: How much is that extra (little bit of) quality worth? How big of a
lens do I want to haul around? How wide do I want my lens to be? The Tiffen
Megaplus lenses aren't perfect, but they work well for my own use.
[Editor's Note: The images, full-sized .JPGs direct from the camera, were
all resized and unsharp masked 50% in Photoshop 7. No sharpening was performed on
the several crops of the full-sized images. No other manipulations were
made.]
