Talked a little about a specific long lens below a couple of posts. Now let's talk about really short lenses. This photograph was made of Trish and Marriah using a 45mm f4 lens on the Pentax 6x7. In that format it qualifies as a super-wide or ultra-wide and is the equivalent of about a 20mm lens in 35mm format. The difference between an ultra-wide and a fisheye lens is that a fisheye is not corrected for distortion (and fisheyes generally are shorter yet). A fisheye will not render straight lines as straight (unless they pass through the lens axis) or parallel lines as parallel.

Of course the parallel vertical lines in this picture aren't parallel either, but they would have been if I'd kept the camera level instead of tilting it down like I did.

I've been using the short lens a lot lately. Someone said once that as you get older you start preferring wide angle lenses. I don't know that's true as I still use a normal about half the time, but I do appreciate the ability to put more story into the photographs. This is a change from the tight simple work I was doing only a few years back using moderate long lenses.

Tilting a wide-angle on the lens axis will give strange results and the images will get all goobery. Some folks like that, but I don't. Maybe later. Tilt the lens axis itself and you get wildly diverging parallels. I do like that almost cartoonish effect. The main thing for me though is that I can include interesting context with a wide that I'd have to work harder to show with a normal or long lens. This picture is obviously set in a hotel room, and the actions of the players are also obvious.

One of the downsides of wides is that they generaly are slower than normals. Of course money buys speed if the camera maker offers speed, but I'll most often make up for slower glass with faster film. In medium format, it's a good option.

Had a fisheye for a 6x7 a long time back. Paid a whole lot of money for it and never used it beyond the initial novelty pictures. It seems that the lesson of the 800mm below and the fisheye is that most photography can be done with a small number of conventional lenses, and novelty lenses are only a good investment if one values them for something other than their utility. As in the pic below - Oh, what a big lens you have, Mr. Nelson...