Northwest Dive Club

I got a cheap (aka:free) wide angle attachment for my 18-55mm lens on my Nikon D3200 and I have been having so much fun with the wide angle, but the quality sucks. I'm now looking for a real wide-angle lens but keep running across more add-ons. any suggestions on what I should be looking for?

Wide or Fisheye?

For true fixed Fisheye I think the 10.5mm from Nikon takes the lead. I have one and really enjoy it.

For adjustable the Tokina 11-17mm gets tons of praise.

With either you are going to need a dome port for it to work right.

I bought a Tamron 11-18mm a couple of years ago and only use it on land so far. I don't have an adjustment ring for my housing and shooting my 10.5mm or my 60mm Macro, also Nikon, has worked well enough for me so far. I don't recall why I chose it over the similar lens at the time, but I did spend a lot of time researching.

+1 on the tokina 10-17. I nearly always run it at 10.

Echo wrote:I got a cheap (aka:free) wide angle attachment for my 18-55mm lens on my Nikon D3200 and I have been having so much fun with the wide angle, but the quality sucks. I'm now looking for a real wide-angle lens but keep running across more add-ons. any suggestions on what I should be looking for?

For underwater use the tokina 10-17 is highly regarded as the best lens for DX cropped sensor cameras, at the wide end is excellent for photographing reef scenes, while the higher end is useful for wide angle closing of single subjects.

A tokina 12-24 is a good rectilinear (non-fisheye) lens. It doesn't go as wide as its fisheye cousin, but it's more useful for topside photos as it doesn't distort straight lines as much as the fisheye. You will likely need a +2 close focus diopter with this

Do you have a dome port? You will need one for any wide angle lens. When you put a dome on your housing it has to be matched to the intended lens. Check with the manufacturers specs.






Dan

I use a dome port already. Thanks guys,

I've been reading reviews on the Tokina 10-17 and folks with the D3200 are saying the auto focus doesn't work. My housing doesn't have a manual focus option.

Echo wrote:I've been reading reviews on the Tokina 10-17 and folks with the D3200 are saying the auto focus doesn't work. My housing doesn't have a manual focus option.

Looks like that's true. Per B&H Photo on the Tokina 10-17: "Autofocusing with this lens is not supported with Nikon DSLRs without a built-in autofocus motor, such as the D40, D40x, D60, D3000, D3100, D3200, D5000, D5100, and D5200."

uwphotographyguide has lens reviews on the Sigma 8-18mm and Nikon 10-24mm that might be options for you. Looks like they both allow for the auto focusing that you need.

Has anyone tried the lens rental websites? I think I'm going to rent a couple lenses before I commit to one

I've rented from glazer's locally with success.

Cool, and thanks