January 3, 2011
Bisti With Frost and Nice Clouds

On the day after Christmas my true love gave to me … … frost in the Bisti Wilderness and nice clouds in the morning. I headed out to one of my favorite locations and enjoyed photographing the grand landscape, i.e. including the sky. Interesting clouds in the sky make an image that includes the sky so much better. The repeating lines of clouds angle down nicely towards the hoodoo on the left and the shadow from the boulder in the lower right leads to the same hoodoo — great convergence! I used my favorite landscape lens, the Canon TS-E 24mm f3.5 L II, to capture the image above and used the tilt motion to align the plane of focus along the boulder and the top of the hoodoos, and I used Live View to check the focus before capturing the image.

The clouds were so interesting overhead that a lens wider than 24mm would have opened up some nice compositions. I've been interested in the AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED lens for wide-angle landscape work after reading several reviews touting its sharpness. I recently discovered that The Digital Picture has test data for lenses other than Canon, so I eagerly compared the Nikon 14-24 with the Canon TS-E 17mm f/4L, the other wide-angle lens I've been considering. With the Nikon at 16mm, the 14-24 is sharper than the TS-E 17 in the center, but image quality in the mid-frame and corner are better with the TS-E 17, so I'll likely get a TS-E 17 before my next grand landscape destination.

I had initially shied away from both the Nikon 14-24 and the Canon TS-E 17 because they have a bulbous front element that prevents the use of my 4-inch (100mm) neutral density filters. However, there are plenty of times where the wider angle would be appreciated and a neutral density filter isn't required.