The 18-55 is fine.
When all we had was film, chasing 'wider' lenses for landscapes had more validity; SLR's came with a 'normal angle' 50 on them, and usually a fat one, which isn't all that important for landscapes when you usually want a tighter aperture for greatest DoF and are focusing close to infinity. 'Compacts' usually came with a fixed 35mm 'mild wide angle', and many landscape photographers used them, rather than lug a hefty SLR and a bag of glass about! Self included. Amused me walking up the Malverns with no more than my diddy Olympus XA2 and a table-top tripod in my pocket; and a chap panting up the hill with 'all the gear', commenting that 'really' needed a 'sturdy' tripod, and a 'proper' camera I could put a remote release cable on?! However...To get that bit 'extra' in the frame, a 28 was 'nice', and there was a vogue for 28mm lens compacts in the '90's, but that was about as wide as you could often get; 24 or even 22mm wides were about as wide as you could get and were rather darn expensive! I chanced on a 12mm fish (equv of an 8mm on APS-C digital).. had a lot of fun with that lens, but it is NOT I repeat NOT a super-wide angle! Nor is it a full-fish. Its a bit neither fish-nor
Fish are Fish NOT super-Wide-Angles.
A full fish gives you a round image in the middle of the frame with 180 degree field of view in both planes.; 8mm can just about get there on full frame, but on APS-C Digi you have to get down to the 4.5mm. This gives a number of issues with full-fish photo's that start with only using about half the frame, and a large chunk of that suffering gross distortion at the edges; and they make the subject TINY in the viewfinder... most of which is black, so composition, is actually quite tricky, spotting distracting detail and levelling to control that distortion, ad then, you have a wobbly 'fish effect' photo;
THAT is the sort of thing you get. Note flare at the top; its almost possible to avoid with 180 FoV. Observe how large close subjects are, and how quickly they get small into the middle distance, as well as the barrel distortion round the edges. This isn't a 'land-scape'.Take out the people that are the subject of this shot, and you have a HUGE expanse of frame filled with the grass at your feet, a HUGE expanse of sky, and err... yeah, there MIGHT be a little bit of lands-scape in the middle there some-where... and if you crop that out? You might as well have shot that with the 18-55 at around the 24 mark, and spread it over all the cameras pixel sensors, rather than just a fifth of them! Fish are Fish, not SWA!
8mm on an APS-C, like the 12 I used on film, is less 'fishy', and a little easier to work with; you get a corner masked / vignetted 'crop' from the middle of that circle, that might have 170 deg FoV diagonally, about 150 or so from side to side; but the same issues are still there, and its still fish, not SWA, and absolutely no substitute. Especially now that SWA are that much more readily available and affordable. If you want SWA the buy a SWA not a fish! If you want fish, fine, buy fish, just be aware, they ent and never will be a SWA and are not a particularly suitable lens for classic big Landscape photography.
Meanwhile, I offer caution on SWA lenses even. 18mm of modern Digi lens is about 27mm FF equiv; a tad wider than the 28/29mm wides that were as wide as we could usually get for film, without breaking the bank.And MORE than wide enough for most. Nice 'trick' of the 18-55 is that you can zoom in and 'scan' the scene to 'inspect' far detail a tad more easily before racking out to compose the 'wide' shot, and this is even more important these days.
Wider you go, more scenery you pack in your landscape,more you are likely to struggle to exclude ugly or distracting features and detail. And You NEED that discipline to check the full frame when composing, far more than you need anther lens!;
"North-South-East-West,Check the Corners then the rest!" I thought I was reasonably diligent in that regard, but digitising my old 35mm film, has shown I wasn't as diligent as I thought! I blame view-finder masking, and commercial print 'cropping' from 2x3 negative proportions to 7x5 print paper proportion, and now looking at the full frame on the neg, B-U-T, I still captured a lot of stuff I didn't really want. And in our modern digital era there's a HECK of a lot more stuff you probably don't want, than stuff you do! Far more folk out and about in the countryside to clutter your picture, for starters; and with them, their cars and push-bikes and prams and picnic bags and 'stuff', then masts for their mobile 'phones, wind turbines, power lines, and other man-made structures of all sorts, from polythene green-houses to steel-frame barns! And its ALL brightly coloured, competing for attention.
This is all simply avoided, by NOT being so greedy to go so wide to start with, in Landscape photo, and not thinking that you have to have so much real-estate in the frame, and that more Land makes better Land-Scape.Be selective; This is where SWA and maybe fish might start to work for rather than against you; when you DON'T have big landscape to work in; you are working in smaller spaces, urban landscapes where you are close up to your subjects and a SWA is the only way to get it all in frame, but, they are still tricky to work with; detail is small, distortion an issue, and you still have to have that 'diligence' to fully assess everything you are trying to pack in the frame.; and working with the 'kit' and finding where you are hitting the buffers of its capability and fiding ways of working within and around them, will take you a lot further than another bit of glass and plastic, that WONT d it all for you.
great lens, can be has used for around £200, less if your lucky.
