Hi,
I am wondering if any of you awesome landscape photographers can help me with a lens question please?
I bought a Canon 18-55mm IS lens a couple of months ago for a vacation. Our photography mostly revolves around birding, using a canon 20D and a 400D (xti) but the Island where we stayed is extremely beautiful, so we bought the 18-55mm IS for some landscape shots. It seemed to get decent reviews, and it was cheap.
I did some basic testing before we left, and it is a sharp copy, especially stopped down .It brought up really wonderful detail on subjects such as flowers, buildings and statues, for example, corner to corner.
However during my vacation, I was disappointed with basically all of my landscape pictures. Closeups were fine, but anything wide and `landscape-ish' looked kind of bad. I managed to get reasonably good sky and water colors from using a CPL, this also resulted in softness as well as some difficulties with keeping the polariser in the right position (the front of the lens rotates during AF).
I tried a variety of f stops, from f/11 tp f/22, and kept the camera low, on a tripod. Still, the pictures seemed to be lacking any kind of `wow' qualities, even the ones which were composed well. A lot were inexplicably softish, and the contrast and clarity was not really there.
I've ordered a tamron 17-35mm f/2.8 which will arrive tomorrow, to basically help work out what's wrong with my landscape photos. I'll sell one of them afterwards.
I guess what I'm hoping for is any suggestions, and to know whether you think the 18-55mm lens lacking `something'?
Thanks so much for hearing me out, lol. Its good to know there are forums like this one on the net:)