After thinking about it for years, and more seriously in the last year or so, I finally pulled the trigger on a wide angle camera zoom lens. Buying camera lenses is always hard, because there's so much overlap and variations on different models that it's hard to decide what is going to be your ideal. You don't want to get it wrong, because good lenses aren't cheap, and you hopefully get decades of use from them.
I narrowed it down to the 16-35mm f/2.8 and the 17-40mm f/4. The former is more than twice the cost of the latter, which immediately makes you wonder if it is twice as good. As with everything technological that is used to make something of subjective quality, there are all kinds of opinions out there. The zoom range is pretty similar, so the practical difference is that the 16-35mm is one stop faster. Considering the primary function, in my mind, is to shoot wide and typically outdoors, I can't say that the extra stop is entirely necessary.
So with that in mind, spending less than half made more sense to me. I was a little concerned that it didn't go significantly wider than the 24-105mm that I have, but one look through the viewfinder and the difference was immediately obvious. I'll give it a whirl this weekend on our construction tour at Cedar Point, where I expect I'll be in a good spot to be very close to very large things. It will also help me get over the slight purchase regret once I've used it.
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