What Lens is This?

I posted a few more pictures from Friday’s Brookside Gardens trip to my flickr photo stream. All my Brookside Gardens images may be seen by clicking here.

So, what lens do you think I used for this image? (Those of you who have looked at the image info at flickr can’t guess). Look at the relatively shallow and tightly controlled depth of field, and the apparent relationship between the yellow tulip in the foreground, and the rest of the flowers. Definitely a medium, or even long telephoto, right?

Not even close! This was shot with a 12-24mm wide angle zoom, at 24mm. The aperture was f/4 (wide open) and the shutter speed was 1/1250 of a second. But wait a minute. Don’t wide angle lenses tend to have gobs of depth of field, even when the aperture is wide open? Well, the way a wide angle lens is generally used, sure.

Many photographers gravitate to wide angle lenses to produce great grand landscape images. They stand back, and look at a scene and say, “Wow! Look at all this wide open space. I want to convey that to my audience. I’ll use a wide angle lens, so I can capture this great forground feature, and show the vastness of this scene. It’ll be cool.”

But, like any other lens, the closer you are to your subject, the shallower the depth of field will be. In this shot, the yellow tulip is about a foot from the sensor plane. It’s absolutely as close as I could get, and maintain sharp focus. The tulips in the background are maybe a foot further back.

I could have captured a similar image with a long lens, but, the background tulips would have been compressed together into a pinkish-yellow mush. Using the wide lens allowed me to focus on the one bud and make it stand out, yet still show that there were many individual flowers in the background.