But that is silly. You can just as easily put an ultra-wide lenses on a large format view camera or medium format and get exaggerated perspective and field of view.
I agree that over use of extreme wide angle lenses is a problem and IME is the particular issue with newbies, BUT there is nothing unique about DSLRs in this regard.
Hi Kirk,
I absolutely agree. The trouble is that most newbies (and even a fair number of old farts) do not grasp that the issue is not really in the lens. Whether one uses a DSLR with a short focal length, or a DSLR with a longer FL with stitching, or a view camera, makes no difference for the 'look' if one captures an identical field of view and uses a rectilinear projection on the resulting image plane.
The (ultra)wide-angle 'look' comes from
viewing the resulting image from a distance that's too far away for the focal length used. For a 'natural' look, one needs to view the image from a distance that's proportional to the FL used to record it (and from the bottom of the image in case of high buildings). That may require a wide angle shot to be viewed at an uncomfortably short distance, thus we tend to view it from farther away, and there the cognitive unease is created.
As an example, the shots with a 17mm FL on a 36mm wide sensor array, need to be viewed at a 300mm / 17mm = 17.65x output magnification if we want to view it from 300mm for an identical projection as our lens. So our output needs to be something like 36mm x 17.65 = 635 mm (25 inches) on the long side for normal reading (300mm) distance viewing. When we look at a smaller version on a web page, e.g. 7 inches (177.8 mm) on the long side, we'd need to look at it from an even more uncomfortable 84mm distance to keep the projection identical to the lens/sensor projection. Because we look at it from farther away, the vanishing points from the viewing position don't agree with the projection anymore. That's where the wide-angle 'look' comes from.
The 17mm (or equivalent FLs on other formats) is helpful if confronted with tight spots, or when one
deliberately wants to exagerate the spaciousness, because the output will almost always be viewed from 'too far away' for the projection used to look natural.
The same principle of anamorphic projection perspective applies to e.g. signs painted on the road, or street drawings, they need to be viewed from exactly the correct (projection) position to look natural. Any deviation from the ideal position and things start looking 'unnatural'.
Cheers,
Bart