It’s a constant debate whether it is a good idea to use a UV / skylight filter on your lens for protection. There are viable arguments for either choice.
During this recent shoot with Jeannie Dee, I immediately noticed that with these heavily backlit portraits, I was getting an unusual amount of flare …
… and removing the filter on front of the lens immediately helped. Noticeably so!
Shooting towards a bright light source or a bright background,
is one time where NOT using a filter makes absolute sense.
You risk getting lens flare, no matter how good the filter is.
This amount of flare doesn’t necessarily mean the image is unusable though …
I’ve been very happy with the older 70-200mm f2.8 VR telephoto zoom. Even even though the edges are softer than the center, it never bothered me. With weddings, I am mostly only interested in the center portions of the image being super-crisp. Similarly, the vignetting didn’t bother me. I usually add more vignetting in post-processing anyway.
Doing a few test shots around the house, and was immediately impressed. It is sharp! I like sharp. Every thing about this lens is good news. Focusing is faster, and flare is very well controlled. There has been considerable debate about the shortening of focal length with this lens as you focus closer and closer. Yet, I would never have noticed it if I hadn’t been told about it. For my work, a total non-issue.
One of the features of this new lens, is that it has even more aggressive vibration reduction / stabilization. So even though I do take my shutter speeds low at times, my advice is always that if you want sharp images, the first thing you need to do is make your shutter speed much faster. Now, I’ve never been one to really be able to hold my camera steady without careful control or with steadying myself against a wall. So for me, vibration reduction is an essential feature on long lenses .. especially since I don’t work with a tripod for the style of photography I do.
At a wedding on Saturday, where I was the second shooter for a friend, I was able to see how the VR worked during an actual photo shoot. During the ceremony I took photos of the guests sitting in the dark temple. How dark? 1/6 th @ f2.8 @ 2000 ISO kinda dark …
Until recently, I’ve been a PC user. I didn’t have much interest in using a Mac, although I dearly loooove my iPhone and iPod. I also have a high appreciation for Apple’s minimalist design and aesthetics. Macs do look very cool.
Yet I didn’t feel the need or desire for a Mac. PCs run fast. It’s a stable platform with a wide choice of programs. On top of that, there were some things which put me off the Mac. The thing I found most annoying was the fanboyism of the Mac enthusiasts. Any problem you’d encounter on a PC, you’d get a gloating chorus of, ”just use a Mac.” Equally aggravating was the assertion that Macs are sooo intuitive. You know what? If Macs were so intuitive you wouldn’t have to explain their operation to me, would you?
Initially I was a little under-whelmed with the Mac experience, but then a few things fell into place for me in terms of software and hardware options … and then I switched my main computer that I work on (ie the laptop), over to the MacBook Pro. Suddenly it all made sense!
All of this will be old news to Mac lovers. When I was gushing about my new setup to a friend of mine last week, she just laughed, “Where have you been all this time?”.
The things that fell into place for me had a big impact on my post-production workflow and efficiency, and I’d like to share some of my observations and new experience …
Last week, I had an interesting lunchtime conversation with a photographer acquaintance of mine. (It also happens that I’ll be photographing his wedding later this year.) We mostly talked about photography business related topics, but at some point I mentioned the origins of this website. How it came to be, and why the geeky domain name, and some of the original pages on here.
One of the first articles I wrote, was this one on the advantages of having a higher maximum flash sync speed. It is an explanation of why the Nikon D70 had an advantage over the Canon 10D. (They were the two most popular D-SLRs at the time). The Nikon D70 has a maximum flash sync speed of 1/500th, but only went down to 200 ISO. The Canon 10D has a maximum flash sync speed of 1/250th, but went down to 100 ISO. There were huge debates on the photography forums whether the D70 had the advantage or not, since many argued that 1/500th @ 200 ISO is the same as 1/250th @ 100 ISO.
That webpage explains why the D70 would have a distinct advantage. In describing the gist of this to my friend, I realized that my explanation on that page could’ve been much simpler.
So here it is – the advantage of having a higher max flash sync speed – but explained in a way that is more concise …
The specialty of a macro lens is in allowing you much much closer to your subject than a normal optic would .. with the ease of continuous focusing from infinity to the closest distance. No need to screw in additional rings or lenses or reverse your lens. A macro lens works as a close-up lens, and as a more usual optic. And that’s the versatility of it.
hands-on review: Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS lens
I got hold of an early copy of the new Canon 100mm f2.8 macro IS lens,
courtesy of LensProToGo, the lens rental company.
The main feature of the new macro lens is that it offers stabilization. Now this might not seem such a big deal to photographers who work with a tripod and photograph more static subjects – but the moment you want to shoot on the move, and play around fluently with your composition and angles – then using the lens hand-held becomes a huge advantage.
Instead of photographing the usual macro subjects – flowers and insects – I decided to test out this new lens on a portrait session with a model, Annisa.
In the photo above, my settings were 1/200th @ f3.2 @ 400 ISO. In testing the lens with and without the IS enabled, there is a clear difference in the crispness of the (handheld) images. There’s no doubt that the IS works, and is a major improvement on the previous generation of this lens ..
I have already posted several images from the extended photo session with Sarah and Mark – but here is the epic video. The intention with these photo sessions was to expand Sarah’s portfolio as much as we could.
We started off at Coney Island, doing a session with Sarah and Mark at the edge of the beach with Sarah in swimwear .. and from there it went into more of a lifestyle shoot with the two of them on the boardwalk. Later on we had Sarah run towards the camera in sportswear. But we rained out with a massive thunderstorm rolling in over New York. We picked up the photo session again in Battery Park. Much of this session and onwards weren’t caught on video since the-other-Neil, who assisted me, had to stay with the van and drive around looking for parking while we continued with the shoot. There is a short section though, showing some of the Battery Park session. From there we moved up to Times Square to photograph a very glamorous looking Sarah in evening wear in Times Square.
Hopefully all of this will be a great view of the approach during a photo session, and how there is no single static way of doing things. Various techniques are used; the lighting too is varied; all to give a wide range to the look of the final images ..
I believe many photographers hesitate in spending money on a full-featured flashgun, thinking it is better to start off with a smaller and less expensive flashgun until they “get more into it”, or understand flash photography better. Yet, this conservative approach to getting a full-featured powerful flashgun works against them being able to achieve the results they would like.
The top-of-the-range speedlights offer features and abilities that will enable you as a photographer, whether it is because of the extra power, or the way the flashhead swivels and rotates, or some of the other features. All of these combine in making the more expensive flashguns the better choice, since they do make it easier to bounce the light from your flash .. and it is in bouncing your flash when indoors that you get the best results from a speedlight when it is mounted on the camera.
With D-SLRs having ever higher resolving power, and lenses just getting better in terms of optical quality .. and digital photography giving us the possibility of looking at images at 100% resolution, we are becoming ever more aware of slight discrepancies in focusing and sharpness. Especially so with lenses that have very wide apertures.
Quite often a camera will be within spec, and a lens be within spec in terms of their individual tolerances, but combined, they might be outside of tolerance. Or perhaps a lens wasn’t quite within spec .. but for whatever reason, we might end up with a camera and lens combination which juuuuust isn’t quite as sharp as it could be.
For example, with the one lens I recently bought, the Nikon 200mm f2 VR, I frequently felt that I could touch up the focus manually a little better than the camera had focused. And checking on the camera’s LCD screen, I could see that. From the most recent shoot where I used this lens, (which I’ve shown in earlier postings), here is an image where the lens back-focused. And it appeared to do this consistently.
[ click on the image to see a larger version ]
Now at normal web-size and even small print enlargements, you wouldn’t be able to discern that the image isn’t quite focused accurately on her nearest eye. But as soon as you go to 100%, you can see the focusing error …
A few times a year I’m fortunate enough to photograph a destination wedding, where I fly out to a more glamorous location than New Jersey. The Bahamas, Aruba, Jamaica, and even locations within the USA are choice destinations for couples who are looking to have their weddings in an exotic locale.
The choice of equipment to fly out to photograph a destination wedding, as well as the way to transport them becomes a real concern. You have to have a flexible selection of gear with you, with a certain amount of redundancy in case something goes wrong with a piece of equipment. Yet it all has to fit into a portable camera bag or case – and one that can be taken on board a plane as a carry-on bag. This really is of great importance, since if you read some news reports it would even appear as if thievery from luggage at airports are rampant.
So there is the delicate balance – a sensible choice of equipment that has to fit into a bag that is the right size for international carry-on luggage …
.. will be the one where the camera manufacturers allow me some input into the matter. If only Nikon and Canon (and Pentax and Fuji and everyone else) would just gather around a table and listen to me. If only …
When I get to handle a new camera, I often wonder why the manufacturers designed a camera the specific way they did. It might be the strange placement of a button or control; or the omission of a feature, or even the deliberate hampering of features in the non-pro bodies. Sometimes I just wish they would bring in a feature that I love on another camera.
Here are the gear-head musings on what I would insist the Best Camera in the World would be like, if I had any say in it. (Sorry, but that means this posting will have a lot of words and no images this time around.)
Firstly, the Best Camera in the World would have to be a modern full-frame digital SLR camera (D-SLR) for the combination of accessibility, versatility and image quality.
I recently moved from using Canon 1D mkIII bodies to using Nikon D3 bodies. Personally, I think the Nikon D3 is the best camera that has ever been made to date. But there are a number of pros and cons, and not everything falls in favour of the Nikon D3. Therefore most of this post is a comparison between these two cameras, and which things from either camera I would want to see in the Best Camera in the World.
But before we even get there, I have to touch on something - Exposure Modes. Both these cameras fall down sorely when it comes to how the exposure modes are accessed. Pentax’s ingenuity here towers over them in this regard.
