Recommendation on Camera Lens

[Condoguy]

I am not that knowledgeable on cameras so excuse my ignorance in this area.  I purchased a Canon EOS Rebel XS a couple of years ago.  The lens says it is 55mm-18mm so I thought this would produce wide angle shots.  I want to photograph interior shots of rental condos to display on the web.  With my previous digital camera, I would take a photograph of a bedroom and end up with a shot of the bed and little else.  I thought the Canon, with a lens that would drop to 18mm would produce more of an image of the room.  However, I can see only a marginal difference from the previous camera.  Can someone make a recommendation as to either a new lens or possible an adapter to the current lens that would increase the field of view.

[cicopo]

It's not hard to see why you're a bit confused as to why 18 mm isn't wide enough. On the old SLR's and a modern FULL FRAME DSLR it would be a very wide angle lens BUT the camera you have is what's known as a crop body (smaller sensor) so EVERY lens you use on it acts 1.6 times longer. In other words that 18 mm acts like a 28 mm lens. Your needs require something like the Canon 10-22 or a third party lens with similar specs. I have not used the Canon 10-22 but it gets very good reviews & any images I've seen from it has very little of the distortion such extra wide lenses normally produce.

[JoeDavid]

The Rebel cameras use a smaller "crop" sensor than the full-frame (35mm film) size sensor.  That means that there is a multiplication factor of 1.6x that factors in to the focal length of the lens.  For example, 18mm would be very wide angle on a full-frame sensor but on a Rebel it is the equivalent of 18x1.6=28.8mm (in terms of a 35mm lens).  Canon makes a 15-85mm EFS lens that gets you down to a 35mm equivalent of 24mm which is fairly wide but, if you are shooting interiors, you really need to look at their EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 lens.  It is a true ultra-wide zoom for the crop sensor camera bodies.  It doesn't have image stabilization so you may also need a tripod if the interiors are dimly lit.

[ebiggs1]

I can vouch for the Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM Lens. Good lens!

It is well worth it's price of around $720.00. But be warned, it will not work on any Canon FF, if you upgrade later on.

[7D5D]

For your existing (crop) camera get the EF-S 10-22. You might want to rent that lens first to see what kind (if any) distortion you get.

[Skirball]

+3 for the 10-22.  As the previous poster said, 18mm just isn't that wide on a 1.6 crop sensor.  The 10-22 gives you quite wide field of view.  I use it frequently for real estate photography and it has served me well.  Most times the lens never comes off my camera.  It's wide enough at 10mm to back into a corner and grab pretty much the entire room.  The distortion isn't too bad at 10mm, and negligible at 12mm.  Lightroom does a reasonably good job at correcting distortion and falloff for the lens.  I have read a lot of people praising the lack of CA, but I still find myself doing a fair amount of work in post to clean it up.

Oh, and I highly recommend picking up software to fix perspective.  Photoshop and Lightroom can do it, but if you're shooting with ultrawides a lot I found it to be worth my time to invest in 3rd party software.  I've been very happy with DxO Labs Optics Pro.  I only use it for perspective, as I've been happy with the automated profiling of the 10-22 in Lightroom, but it can also correct distortion.   And Hah!   I couldn't remember the name of the program so I looked it up and I found out that Optics Pro also has a correction for CA.  Can't believe I didn't see that feature.  I'll have to give tthat a shot and see how well it works.