One of the biggest problems with the Canon 1DMIII is that there is very limited wide angle options for its 1.3x crop with no dedicated lenses for it.

Of course, it was designed as an action/sports camera, not a wide angle camera.

My budget does not extend to a EF 16-24mm MII lens and I don’t want a fisheye, and I want to use it also for infrared photography with a nice small Hoya R72 filter (large versions of these can cost about $A300, so a nice small 49mm or 52mm filter thread doesn’t stretch your budget so much).

My solution is to use the Olympus OM 21mm f/3.5 lens and an AF-confirm OM-to-EOS adapter.
You do need to use manual focus and the aperture must be manually stopped down, but you do get very good results such as this one from an art installation in Melbourne yesterday:

Note, there was no polariser or other filter used here and just some exposure adjustment in RAW development as unfortunately, the playback image on the Canon LCD is NOT representative of the jpeg it produces (unlike the Olympus E510 where its jpegs straight from the camera look great and similar to its LCD playback – with Canon, I find you really should shoot RAW and post-process).

More images of this combination, including infrared can be found here.

Information on Olympus OM lenses can be found here, and information on wide angle lenses here.

Have I mentioned Melbourne’s a great place? Just don’t tell anyone, we don’t want it to change too much!