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Photography Tips: Week #6 – Lenses (part 2 – my lenses)

Apr 09, 2008

Continuing with our lens themed week (yesterday I wrote about basic lens information and last week I wrote about what to consider when purchasing a camera), today I’ll cover what lives in my camera bag (as well as the lenses that got booted from it).

Sorry Nikon photographers…this is a Canon post.

My Lenses

Canon 70-200 f/2.8 L IS

It is hard for me to pick a favorite lens, because I love them all, but if I had to pick just one favorite, it would probably be this one.

Pros: I love the beautiful bokeh it creates for portraits, and being a long (telephoto) fast (the maximum aperture is f/2.8) lens with 3 stops of image stabilization (I can take pictures in places that are three times darker), it is my best friend at indoor wedding ceremonies. I recommend it wholeheartedly to wedding photographers–I wouldn’t want to be without it. I also use it a lot for portraits–long lenses are more flattering, they condense a scene making it possible to bring a mountain or city skyline closer to your subject, and long lenses can also isolate a subject from a cluttered background better than a normal or telephoto lens.

Cons: It’s expensive. I think it would be hard to justify this lens if you couldn’t make money from it. People also complain about the weight…but I don’t think that’s a good reason not to carry the best equipment for the job. And needing to carry heavy equipment is a great reason to stay in shape. :)

Canon 135mm f/2.0 L

Since purchasing this lens last month, it has been a disproportionate amount of time on my camera. It definitely comes a close second to the 70-200 as my favorite lens. It’s the lens I keep on my camera for taking family pictures.

Pros: This is a long fast lens, so it has all the benefits of the 70-200 (with the exception of image stabilization). It’s faster than the 70-200 (f/2.0 instead of f/2.8) so the bokeh from it is even more amazing. It’s relatively lightweight. And this is one super sharp lens. The pictures I get from it are incredibly sharp and it focuses very quickly. A fellow photographer and friend of mine calls this her “magic lens.” At $900, it’s also a fantastic deal for such beautiful quality.

Cons: This is a fantastic focal length for my style and on my full frame 5d camera, but on a 1.6 FOVCF body (rebel, 20/30/40d, etc) I can see it being too long (or too “zoomed in”) for many people’s liking.

Canon 24-70 f/2.8 L

This was our first lens, and it is a fantastic multi-purpose lens. Many pros list it as their favorite lens, or the one lens they would keep if they could only have one.

Pros: It is fast, sharp, focuses quickly, and has a great range–a perfect “every day” focal length range.

Cons: I like the 24-70 more on a 1.6 FOVCF body than I do on the 5d–it’s a little too short for my style on a full frame body (but is great in tight quarters or for groups). This is another on-the-big/heavy-side lens.

Canon 17-40 f/4 L

This is our wide angle lens, and it does a great job of that. Perfect for wide angle wedding scenes.

Pros: It is a great wide angle lens. It is a fantastic deal–$650 and fairly small and lightweight. When I need a wide angle shot, I know I’m going to get a great one.

Cons: I’m not a huge fan of wide angles (though I know they are popular right now in portraits)–I prefer the flattering telephoto lenses. So this lens doesn’t get used much.

Canon 50mm f/1.4

This gets my vote for the one I recommend most to new photographers. If you are on a tight budget and can only get one lens, this is the one to get.

Pros: It is very fast, fantastically inexpensive ($250), and has beautiful bokeh (unlike it’s cheaper illegitimate sister, the 50mm f/1.8). This one also spends a lot of time on my camera at home. It’s wide aperture and multi-purpose “normal” focal length makes it a great bet for family photos. It is tiny and very lightweight. (And it’s the least expensive lens in my bag, so if something gets dropped or damaged from being out, at least it’s not an expensive loss!) You are also able to get very close to your subject with it–it has a minimum focusing distance of 1.5 feet, which means I can very nicely fill the frame with my little two year old subject.

Cons: Can’t think of any. Unless not having a pretty red “L series” stripe can counts as a con.

Lenses I have kicked to the curb

Canon 70-200 f/4 L

Pros: This baby is a fantastic value. One of the least expensive L lenses. It is sharp, relatively lightweight, and a great lens for traveling. We broke this one out for vacations and it was fantastic.

Cons: As a telephoto f/4 with no image stabilization, this was not a good indoor lens. The 70-200 f/2.8 IS kicked its butt, and then when we got the 135mm, we sold this one.

Canon 85mm f/1.8

Another prime lens (so far I’ve discussed the 50mm f/1.4 and the 135 f/2.0). Prime lenses are my faves and I plan on discussing the difference between primes and zooms later this week. But in short, prime lenses are usually a totally fantastic value because they only have to do one thing, and they can do that one focal length extremely well.

Pros: A lot of people like this lens.

Cons: I was not one of those people. To be fair, it IS a nice lens with great image quality and fast focusing at a great value (around $350). I think on a 1.6 FOVCF I would like this lens, but it was useless to me on the 5d. Every time I framed the shot how I wanted it, it would turn out I was too close and I’d have to take a step back. It has an almost 3 feet minimum focusing distance (compared to the 50mm’s 1.5 feet). I bought the 135mm to combat this problem (it also has a 3 feet min focusing distance, but being a much longer lens means that I can frame the shot just how I want it from that distance).

Posted in Photographer Tips

Photography Tip Tuesday: Week #6 – Lenses (part 1)

Apr 08, 2008

Hurray! It’s the day to talk about lenses!

Last week for Photography Tip Tuesday I covered advice for purchasing a camera. This week we get to talk about my favorite subject: lenses. There is a lot to say, so I’ll be breaking this “lesson” up over the course of the week so that no budding photographers give up and stop reading.

Lenses are important investments

Brace yourself: you will probably spend much more on lenses (or at the very least just as much) than you will on the camera body that holds them. But there is good news.

As I said last time, your dSLR is pretty much disposable. You purchase it, it will decline rapidly in value over the next couple of years, and then you’ll upgrade to a newer better model that has made your old body seem ridiculously slow, noisey, and old in comparison (not unlike a first wife–ha ha ha).

Lenses are much better investments. As long as you keep the lens in great condition, you can expect to sell it on ebay or a photography forum and lose only $50-$100! If you purchased the lens on sale or with a rebate, you can even expect to charge what you bought it for–I recently sold a lens for the exact price I purchased it for–all I lost was the shipping fee of $15 (not a bad price for using a lens for five months)!

This is a great argument for purchasing less camera than you can afford in order to buy better lenses than you can afford. When allocating money, the emphasis is safely placed on your lenses–it’s money you can get back. Not to mention that a fantastic lens will make a bigger difference on your images than whether you shoot with a 40d or 5d.

The numbers

When you shop for lenses, the numbers at first look a little alien. Let’s use one of my favorite general-purpose lenses as an example:

Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 L

The Canon part is easy–it’s a Canon lens. The “L” at the end stands for “luxury” and means it’s an L series lens–the optics and build quality of the lens are professional. L series lenses also either have a red stripe at the end or are cream all over. This is so that when you’re out and about with your lens other people can ooh and ahh over how awesome you are for having an L series lens. :P

Focal Length

The first set of numbers (24-70) is the focal length of the lens. The higher the number, the more zoomed in you are.

50mm is considered the “normal” focal length. When you look through a 50mm lens, you see what your eye sees. Anything larger is “telephoto” (or seems “zoomed in”) and anything less is “wide.”

$50mm lens on 5d - \$

telephoto lenses smush backgrounds, making the buildings seem closer

wide angle engagement portrait

These guidelines are based on 35mm film cameras. Most dSLRs have a “crop factor.” (The notable exceptions to this rule are the Canon 5d and Nikon D3). In the case of the Rebel, and 20/30/40ds, they are 1.6 FOVCF bodies, meaning any lens focal length will need to be multiplied by 1.6 to find out its real focal length on that camera body.

So, a 50mm lens isn’t really a normal lens on a Rebel, because it acts like an 80mm (50mm x 1.6) lens.

The next number–aperture

When we bought our first two lenses, I thought we were set for life. We had a 20d, a 24-70 f/2.8 L, and a 70-200 f/4 L lens. In my thinking, we had 38mm-320mm covered (remember that 1.6 FOVCF). We were set. (Luckily Nic knew better and bought me my first fast prime lens–the 50mm f/1.4…and then I was hooked.)

A lot of newbies make that same mistake–looking only at the first set of numbers. The second number, the one after the “f/” is equally important, because it affects how much light you need to take a decent photo without flash.

The lower this number, the wider your lens can open. Why does this matter?

When your lens has a narrow opening, you get a large depth of field–your foreground will be in focus, as well as your background. But because only a little light is getting through, your shutter speed will need to be longer. When your lens has a big opening, your subject will be in focus, but everything else will be blurry. Much more light is able to get in, so you are able to have a much shorter shutter speed.

This is why lenses with a large maximum opening (like f/2.8 or lower) are called “fast” lenses–because they have the ability to open up wide and allow lots of light in, they can have short shutter speeds.

Time for examples. For this group shot, everything is in focus–the feet in front, to the grass in the back.

larger depth of field for a big group

This shot shows a much narrower depth of field–only the front pamphlet is in focus. The rest melt into the background:

shallow depth of field means the booklets melt into the background

Why wide apertures are awesome

When the aperture is wide, not only do you get beautiful background blur (called “bokeh”)…

the individual blades of grass in the field disappear into a pretty yellow blur

…but you have a lot more flexibility indoors and at night. In dark situations your lens will let in enough light that you can still have reasonably short shutter speeds.

The difference at the low end of these numbers is huge. The difference between f/16 and f/11 sounds like a lot, but it is really only one stop of light. f/2.8 and f/2.0 also represents a one stop difference. If the kit lens that a camera comes with is an f/5.6, the difference between it and a good fast lens like the 50mm f/1.4 is four stops of light! You would need a shutter speed four times slower with the f/5.6 lens than with the f/1.4 lens…and that will kill you indoors!

“Image stabilized” or “vibration reduction” lenses [as with the 18-55mm example] compensate for that hand shake, but they won’t compensate for your subject moving all over the place [as with a child]. Image stabilization isn’t a reliable substitute for a fast lens, but it is a great complement.

What is a reasonably short shutter speed?

The minimum shutter speed you can use without getting “hand shake” (blur from your own movement) is relative to your focal length. There is an easy mathematical trick for knowing what your minimum shutter speed is when holding a camera:

1/your focal length

If you have a 50mm lens on a 1.6 FOVCF body, the slowest you want your shutter speed is 1/80 sec. (In this shot I braced myself, held really still and squeezed 1/50 sec out of it)

a fast lens captured this scene without needing a flash

Whew!

I could go on and on and on (and will in the coming days), but for now that is the basic info. Next I’ll cover the lenses in my bag (and the ones that once lived there) and then finally my recommendations for different situations and budgets.

Posted in Baby Photographer, Engagement Portrait Photographer, Family Photographer, Photographer Tips

Photography Tip Tuesday: Week #5 – Cameras

Apr 01, 2008

Hurray! No bad photo to post today!

If you’re new to the blog, on Tuesdays I cover photography tips–providing info for a totally basic point-and-shoot user as well as one for those starting to dive in a little deeper.

Photographers are always asked for advice about gear. Which is great because photographers love to talk about gear! For the next couple of weeks we’ll talk about the things in your camera bag.

Photography is an expensive hobby. If you’re not broke, you’re just not trying hard enough. The two biggies, of course, are your camera and your lenses.

I am really really really really really excited about next week when we’re going to talk about my favorite thing in the world: lenses.

But first we have to cover cameras.

The Basics

I know nothing about the point-and-shoot market in 2008. For specific camera recommendations, I point you to DP Review. In our pre-dSLR days, this is the website we cruised for camera info.

Instead of giving specific recommendations, I offer this advice:

– Don’t buy more camera than you need. It is tempting to buy a fancier camera and think it will make your pictures better. This isn’t always true. Make sure you’re not buying bells and whistles that you don’t intend to use. If you plan on keeping your camera on auto, you probably don’t need a dSLR (but you might still want one–we’ll return to this in a minute). Many of the nicer point-and-shoots come with the ability to use it on manual mode as well as aperture priority and shutter priority (and therefore learn practice and learn more about photography) and they come with better lenses on the front of them than the kit lenses included with entry-level dSLRs.

– Megapixels don’t mean much these days. The difference between a 2 megapixel image and a 4 megapixel image was huge. The difference between a 8 meg and 10 meg camera? Not so much. As Nic says from time to time “it’s the quality of the megapixels that matters” (but I have no earthly idea what that means–maybe he can guest author an entry about it some time).

– Shutter-lag DOES matter. Shutter-lag is that annoying pause between the time you hit the shutter button and the time your picture actually takes. Like how when you take a picture on your cell phone you can hit the “capture” button and then by the time the image actual records, your kid is out of the frame. Shutter-lag doesn’t matter much with landscapes or grown-ups, but if you’re photographing kids, it is HUGE. The best reason to purchase a dSLR if you never plan on taking it off auto is for the ability to take the picture when you mean to take the picture–not when your camera gets around to it.

– What is this SLR term that is thrown about? SLR stands for single lens reflex (which explains nothing, right?) and it simply means that what you see through the viewfinder is coming through the lens (not through a little viewfinder hole). dSLRs are just digital SLRs. With most SLRs, your lens isn’t fixed to the front of the camera–you can use different lenses for different situations (there are fixed lens SLRs–it’s just not what most people mean when they talk about SLRs).

Step It Up

Ready for your SLR? You have a big decision to make: Nikon or Canon?

(There are of course other SLR brands, but let’s be serious: it’s a choice between Nikon and Canon.)

When you buy your first SLR, you’re not just buying a camera–you’re investing in a system. You can’t use a Nikon lens on a Canon body (and vice versa)…so if you buy a (Canon) Rebel now, and in two years want to buy a (Nikon) D3, all of your lenses will need to be sold and you’ll need to buy all new Nikon lenses.

Digital camera bodies are essentially disposable–every couple of years there will be new developments that will make the old camera bodies seem ridiculously slow or noisy or out-of-date. But lenses last forever. Good glass 10 years ago is good glass today. (Which is why lenses retain their value so incredibly well while a 20d on Ebay can be snapped up for less than half of what it cost two years ago.)

When you buy your camera, it is a big investment. But the lenses you buy to put on that camera are your real investment. They can be with you for years and through many different camera bodies, so you want to choose your brand carefully. It just doesn’t make sense to lose money by switching back and forth.

How do you choose?

The good news is that you can’t make a bad decision–Nikon and Canon are both fantastic brands, and there are amazing professionals that fight to the death on which one is better on either side of the debate. The biggest factors that influenced choice Nic and I made were (a) how Nikon and Canon sensors deal with color and (b) the way Nikon and Canon implement technology. The biggest push toward Canon for me was looking at the images of the photographers I admired. They all shot with Canon. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it (I learned later what it was), but I loved the Canon pictures.

What I learned later from the photographic community is that Nikon images tend to be more vibrant straight out of camera and the skin tones more red. Canon tends to deal with skin tones more naturally. (I think this is why you see so many portrait and wedding photographers using Canon while landscape photographers seem to prefer Nikon.) Someone wrote that when post-processing Canon images, you’re coaxing out the color. With Nikon, you’re reigning it in.

We also read that Canon tends to implement their latest technology at the middle of their product line, while Nikon introduces it at the high end. Canon’s approach appealed to us, because we were hobbiests when we bought our first dSLR.

If I was making the same decision today I would also place an emphasis on the range of lenses that Canon offers. They simply have more lenses to choose from.

But the bottom line when you’re picking your first dSLR is to not just compare camera to camera (eg–comparing the Rebel to the D60), but system to system. You’ll have that camera for a couple of years, but that brand will be yours for much longer.

Once you’ve decided on your brand, the decision becomes much easier. The camera you choose can be determined by your budget.

More on your budget and how to allocate it next week when we get to talk about lenses! (I’m excited. Are you excited? Some girls like diamonds. I like fast glass.)

Posted in Photographer Tips