In my last blog entry, I posted a photo of Alexander Calder's Mountains and Clouds sculpture, which is located in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building. I shot the photo with a new ultra wide-angle lens that I had purchased, viz. the Nikon 12-24mm. Since then, I exchanged that lens for the newer Nikon 10-24mm ultra wide-angle lens and revisited the atrium to take another shot of the sculpture.
 

I think this version turned out nicely. If you compare it with the previous version, which I took with the Nikon 12-24, one of the first things that you may notice is that there's less of a problem with parallax or keystoning. This is because the Nikon 10-24 is noticeably wider and I was able to point my camera perfectly level with the ground and achieve the same composition. With the previous photo, I had to point the lens slightly towards the ground in order to capture the front-most potted tree. While the two lenses have only a 2mm difference in minimum focal lengths, the difference in angle of view afforded by 12mm (99°) and 10mm (109°) is quite dramatic in practice.

While processing the two photos, my impression was that the Nikon 12-24 was a bit sharper and contrastier than the Nikon 10-24, but the lighting was brighter when I took the first photo and the smaller angle of view afforded by the 12-24 brings the image in closer, revealing more detail, so it's really hard to compare. On the other hand, the difference in the angle of view was quite dramatic, with the advantage to the 10-24, so I'm happy I made the exchange. I'm looking forward to using the Nikon 10-24 to shoot landscapes this spring.