Threshold Photography Gear

I suspect every photographer has a piece of equipment that changed everything for them. Not always expected, rarely expensive. But the one that unlocked something for them. Sigma 10-20mm Mine was the Sigma 10-20mm. I bought two decades ago out of curiosity not really knowing what to expect of it, but I had seen on forums that a lot of landscapes photographers were using ultra-wide lenses (and I couldn’t afford the Canon 12-22mm). My go-to Tamron 28-300mm at the time had been getting in my way for landscape and seascape work; on an APS-C sensor with a 1.6x crop factor, the effective range pushed to 45-480mm, which meant constantly stepping backwards to fit the world into the frame. It just hadn’t been working for me. You hear a lot about the human eye being equivalent to 50mm, which is probably close enough, though I saw tests showing it’s closer to 43mm, but it ignores what the brain does. Vision is not just capturing light with your eye. The eye moves constantly; the brain assembles…