Wide Angle Converter

Good quality wide angle lenses are quiet expensive (£300-£600). A cheap alternative is the wide angle lense converter that can be easily found on sites like eBay. Again a good quality converter is a little pricy (£50-£200) but the cheap (£20-£50) ones do a fairly good job and have support for almost all kind of lenses. Let’s have a look at two here;

Sher Digital Wide Angle/Macro 0.42 Converter – 52mm

A 50mm lens mounted on a camera with a crop sensor (e.g. EOS 550d/Rebel T2i) becomes something like 80mm lens.(Crop Factor is 1.6x) so it gives you a very limited field of view. Using a converter will change it back to somewhere around 35mm.(Disadvantage: Softer images, harder focous.)

Zeikos 58mm Wide Angle x0.45 Macro Converter -58mm

Zoom lenses get a better result with a converter and the quality of the image is less affected, although you need to be aware of the vignette effect.

Macro Option

Most of these converters are shipped with a detachable macro adapter which gives you the ability to take super macro photos. This is particularly useful when taking photos of insects and tiny items.