50mm Super Wide Angle does Sydney Harbour Bridge

During a business trip to Telelogic's offices in Asia I had a few hours after work to do some night photography, and fortunately my hotel was a five minute walk from the Harbour. After a couple of evenings photographing the Sydney Harbour Bridge and skyline with my Canon 17-40

I decided to experiment with my Canon 50mm f/1.4. At f/5.6. The 50mm is much sharper than the 17-40 and by by taking multiple portrait images I would have a much higher resolution image. A full frame sensor camera would have been the perfect match for this lens, but all I had was the Canon 1Dmk3 with an APS-H (1.3 crop) sensor.

The squiggles along the top of the bridge are seagulls...

12 images in portrait orientation with about 50% overlap merged in Photoshop resulted in a 47megapixel image with excellent detail. Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to take multiple exposures of each image, so I have something to look forward to next time I am in Sydney.

Photographing the Opera House from the front can be a challenge since there is no boardwalk in front and from a moving boat will only work day time when there is sufficient light, so instead I have used a macro lens; the Sigma 150mm f/2.8, from the other side of the Sydney Harbour. In this case 5 images in portrait orientation resulting in a 38 megapixel image.

And finally a shot with the 24-105 which is my walkaround lens. Just a bit too late here since there is no trace of blue left in the sky.

So nowadays although I have an assortment of lenses, if I want to limit the lenses I take out on a day trip I make sure to lean towards the telephoto side, since there is no good way to make up for too short a lens. But I can always find a way to get the wide angle shot.

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