Tag Archives: photography

A couple 0f pictures taken with my new prime lens…

Now that I have more than 1.5 lenses*, it seems like a good idea to test them out against each other.

So this weekend I’m going to set the camera up on a tripod, get all the settings as best I can for the scene, and take lots of the same picture.  I’ll try comparisons of the same aperture and focal length across the different lenses, which means that 50/55mm at F3.5 or so should work on all the lenses. I can also compare 200mm across 2 lenses, and 18mm across 2 lenses.

Obviously results will be posted on here…

* Sigma 18-200mm = 1 lens, Canon stock 18-55mm = half a lens

I often see friends putting on Facebook that they’re about to edit a series of photos taken from a recent event. I often assume this is just to do what I do, and delete the blurry, duplicated and general bad photos.

I’ve since been reading the blog posts from http://www.digital-photography-school.com and many of these focus on the right software to edit your photos with. Now I am a computer expert, so I know you don’t need fancy software to get rid of a few bad photos (unless you want to automate it…). This got me thinking – should I be doing more with the photos I want to keep? I know I’m not the best photographer in the world, and I certainly don’t have the best equipment (my constant excuse for a bad photograph).

Now I can’t afford to buy Adobe Photoshop, and I’m averse to go and download a pirate copy, but I do have GIMP and a little bit of experience with these tools. However I also have the Windows 7 photo editor which allows simple modification of Brightness, Contrast, Shadows, Highlights, Saturation, Colour Tone, Straightness and Red Eye. Having been through a couple of my albums trying the auto-fix and also some manual tweaks, I’ve found some of the photos can end up being much better.

Example:

This is the poorly taken photo (too much light behind)

After editing - colour removed, shadows brightened and contrast adjusted

Now I have another 40GB of photos to go through and edit for real this time.

It’s that time of the year when I get to spend a bit of money on a new lens. This is an opportunity to expand my (limited) collection, however which direction I go in will leave a big whole in the opposite direction.

By this, I mean I currently really only have one lens – a Sigma 18-200 F3.5-6.3. Spending half decent money on a new lens will probably mean choosing something in the prime region, or something in the telephoto region, but not both.

My reference sites for what is available are:

http://www.lensesforhire.co.uk

http://camerapricebuster.co.uk

Both have a large catalog of lenses available, with the former offering a service that allows you to try before you buy (for approximately 5-10% of the price of the lens) and the latter finding you the cheapest price.

I’m currently thinking about going for prime rather than zoom:

Canon EF 50mm f1.8 II (£83.49) – cheap and cheerful prime lens.  Fixed focal length with good aperture (although obviously needs to be stepped down one or two to get optimum picture quality), but cheap construction.

Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM (£275.74) – Much higher quality construction and an extra stop more open, but does it justify spending three times as much?

Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 XR Di (£332.48) – Good quality, fairly good aperture and some flexibility in the focal length.

However, buying the cheapest of the three would leave me enough in budget to also get the Canon EF-S 55-250mm f4-5.6 IS (£166.89) which would then mean I’m replacing my current lens across both ranges with something (at least slightly) better.

Any advice?

* All prices at the time of writing