A Special Message From Amy

An Introduction To Lightroom (4)

An Introduction To Lightroom (4)

Formal and Informal F Stops

Formal and Informal F Stops

Photoshop Tutorials

Click to find out how to master Photoshop.

Testing the new Canon EF 24-70mm f2.8l II USM

  


The other day I purchased the new Canon EF 24-70mm f2.8L II USM lens.  After shooting with it for only 3 days, I can truthfully say that this is now my favorite canon lens. I had complete my research and understood what I was buying, but still, it really didn't stop me from having a few niggling doubts in my mind. Doubts about the $2,300 price was my major worry. I understood it would be a great lens, but was it really worth that much money? I’ve been a photographer for a few years now but that does not prevent me from questioning the price of digital camera supplies.

When I got the lens home I positioned it carefully on my writing desk. I studied at it for a second almost as if I was letting the purchase sink in. I began to unfold the box and carefully took out the lens. It’s not anything dynamic to look at. It’s just a lens. Okay, I will admit, I have the familiar “Red-Ring” fever. This is an affectionate way of discussing a Canon shooters enthusiasm to using nothing else but L series lenses. It describes me perfectly. Well, you can’t blame me really, they are incredibly beautiful and sharp quality.

So what’s so particular about this lens that I just must write down an evaluation about it? To begin with, the glass quality is nothing like Canon have ever done before. If you hanker after sharpness then this is your lens. I discovered that  fstops at in the region of F11 give more clarity and sharpness than other lenses at do at F11.

It will detect the smaller fine points of a subject in very filtered lighting. This is one of the benefits of using a quick lens. Fast lenses work well in low lighting conditions. They do this because of the wide aperture. But open apertures are not as clear as smaller apertures, right? Right. So what do we do about focusing in filtered light? Does this lens still maintain the sharpness of the image? Yes it does. There is sharp detail at F2.8 even if you underexpose a photo.

I took a series of photos about the studio. I chose F2.8, no flash fill or normal room lighting was employed. I selected 6400 ISO to assist get as much lighting as I was able to. My shutter speed was about a 50th of a second. To my astonishment I found my test shots to be clearer and more sharp than expected. Clear and sharp in really low light? You bet they were!

Not only does the filtered light sharpness performance impress me, so does the reaction of the lens. I discovered that as I worked on getting good focus on an region of a subject it grabbed it and held strong. I didn’t have to keep getting the right focus and sharpness on a regular basis. Some lenses I have used in the past have had difficulty getting the right focus and sharpness, particularly when the scene was deep black or very dark grey. The lens held the focus quite sharply all the way to the edges. Admittedly I used a medium to small aperture to keep focus the entire image, but it’s the speediness and accuracy of how the lens mastered this shady subject that impressed me the most.

When I was doing my test shots, I did not use a tripod. It was pretty much hand holding the camera in really low light to see what would happen. I wanted to see how the lens kept focus and clarity. In a shady scene you would have definitely noticed camera shake.

I have discussing getting the right focus and sharpness in dim light. What about sensitivity and other performance issues? Well, aside from being fast to hold sharp focus, I am impressed by the absence of lens flare and no warping at the edges. In a number of lenses you find some bothersome distortion at the start or end of the focal length scale. For example some 24mm lenses can make the exact edges of the frame of the image look like they were photographed through a bit of glass. That’s because when the lighting goes through the lens, it begins to bend and creates a warping outcome. Not with this lens. I have not noticed any distortion at all. This is relevant to the 70mm end of the range also.

It seems to reproduce colours a lot better than any other lens I have shot with. So far all my vibrancy alterations have been very small. This is great for the reason that it means you do not have to spend a long time editing your shots. It just seems to pick up more true colour than my other lenses.

Receptiveness, sharpness, superior colour capture and optimum low light performance is what I love about this lens. It’s a bit heavy in weight, but all the L series lenses are. I am used to heavy gear now so it does not worry me in the slightest. I have yet to find out why this lens is so first-rate. Canon have really set precedent for the entire industry. I highly recommend this lens.

All photos are copyright by Amy Renfrey and must not be used without payment and permission.

Sample images of the Canon EF 24-70mm f2.8L II USM

Sample images of the Canon EF 24-70mm f2.8L II USM

How To Choose A Sturdy tripod

Many photo enthusiasts who seek the best tripod counsel are really seeking a way to find the best sturdy tripod for them. Not all tripods are designed for every single type of photography. Some tripods vary in heaviness, straightforwardness of operation and handling and some have additional attachments to accomplish extraordinary positions for the camera.

Deciding on a tripod originally requires a rock-solid knowledge of what you want and the reason why you want it. Do you like to take close up photography? If that is what you choose then you might want an extra attachment that facilitates to camera to be positioned down through the center of the legs of the tripod, right to the land. Other tripods do not encompass this element purely because they are designed for landscape photography. Landscape professional photographers need a sturdy, stable tripod to guard against movement of blustery weather. They also search for a tripod that’s not too weighty, in case the more adventurous photographer wants to climb a mountain peak to get the very best photo.

Deciding on a sturdy tripod means gaining the best results from a high-quality, concrete reinforcement whereby you can crumple the legs, fasten and detach attachments and put it away. This seems reasonably clear-cut until you look around at the various kinds of tripods on the marketplace today.

A number of tripods have a joy stick head. This means you can slot the camera on the tripod and manually move it from left to right with one control. You can swiftly let go of the handle and it will lock tightly into slot. Other tripods have a simple rotation grip. This lets the digital camera to move laterally only. If you want to shift the camera to move up and down, then you need to make adjustments to be able to accomplish that.

Different functionality is what we need to be conscious of. The best tripod, to me, is the one that is light weight, has effortless functionality and postures the digital camera safely in the place you put it. I had an old tripod that was good for starting out. When I started to be expert at taking pictures I became aware that the tripod was not able to match with the demands of my improving comprehension.

Every time I wanted to place the camera exactly up to the stars at night time, I was unable to. The tripod was not capable to keeping the digital camera in place without it slipping and sliding downwards again.

In order to choose a tripod that’s perfect for you, and I mean one that you are going to love for years to come, then contemplate ergonomics, effortless to lift and reposition and finally ease of function. All these things add to a very joyful and encouraging experience in your photography.

Deciding on a tripod is a very positive stage in your photography. It means you recognize light and how the camera needs to be rocky steady, particularly filtered lighting situations.

September 2012: Focus Competition Results

September 2012: Focus Competition Results

Understanding The Basics of SLR Photography

Understanding the basics of slr photography is not as awkward as it feels. Imagine the digital camera as a box that lets in lighting. On that box is a sequence of various controls. These controls enable you to let a lot or a modest amount of light in. The quantity of light coming in may ascertain how you obtain your photo.

Let's start with the auto function. The auto mode allows the camera to make the judgements for you. This allows you to just focus on taking the photo rather than worrying about the settings. The automatic setting is straightforward however it is not most ideal.

The basics of digital SLR photography are painless to learn when you appreciate how the camera controls lighting. Camera has control over the light two chief ways; Aperture and shutter speed. Your aperture is the opening in which you let your light in. Your shutter speed is how you organize the speed at which the lighting is coming in. You need both to be able to monitor the lighting.

Think of the camera as a human eye. Your aperture is the iris that lets light in and reduces so that light won't come in. The shutter speed is like the blinking eyelid. Your aperture is also known as F stop. F-stop is a numeric value that tells you how much the iris is open. If the cameras aperture is pretty wide then we say that it is a large aperture. A large aperture is a small number. For example F2 .8 is a very large aperture. It means the aperture is open very wide. It is comparable to how the iris acts in low light. The iris will open more to let additional light in so that we can distinguish things in the dark. Your camera is the same.

Aperture not only controls how wide the iris is but it plays a necessary role to play in depth of field. Depth of field plainly means what part of the photo is in focus. If every single thing in the photo is in focus then we call that a long depth of field. If there is only a small part of the photo that is in focus we call this a short depth of field.

A photo that has a short depth of field means that only a small section of the subject is in focus.

A photo that has a long depth of field means that most, or all, of the photo is in focus. This is ideal for landscape photography.

When you have a wide aperture, F2 .8 for example, your depth of field can be short. If you have a small aperture such as F 22, then everything in image is in focus. (Light allowing of course.) I will explain this in a different article.

Shutter speed is intimately linked to time. Shutter speed is calculated in fractions of a second, seconds and then minutes. A number of cameras have a mode called “Bulb”. This will mean that the shutter stays wide open for as long as you keep it open. You can join a special cable to the digital camera and press it just the once. The shutter will open up. It will shut only when you compress the cable button. This will mean that you could have the shutter right open for an hour if your camera permitted.

Let's take for instance the evening sky. There is not much light at the human eye can notice. In this case we may want to leave the shutter open for 10 seconds or more. Then again if we want to take a photo of movement that is fast paced and "stop" the action, then we need to retain a very rapid shutter speed. This is where we get into fractions of a second. I have a Canon 5D Mark II and the shutter speed can go to 1/8000 of a second. This is super fast! I use a rapid shutter speed when I want to shoot the effect of water hanging in midair for example.

 A slow shutter might be anything from 1 second or more. The above photo was taken at 13 seconds so the camera could capture as much light as possible.

This photo was taken at 1/4000th of second. I wanted to create a "frozen in the air" photo. I could only do that if I had a super fast shutter speed.

You will see different shooting modes on your camera dial. Not only do you have the automatic function but you have aperture priority, shutter priority, manual and possibly extra. Aperture priority creates the aperture for you. It means the camera selects what f-stop to use and you choose the shutter speed. Shutter priority works the opposite. This will mean that that the camera chooses the shutter speed and you do the rest These two shooting modes are okay but you still won't get the ideal result. The best mode to use is manual.

When you employ the manual setting you have the most control over your digital camera. You can set the shutter speed and the aperture at the same time. Once you become comfortable with how the manual setting works then you can start to have more control over light. Once you have most control over the light that is when your pictures begin to look gorgeous.

Learning how to use your SLR is not a heavy or difficult process. It actually a lot of excitement and fairly simple when you get the hang of it. The basics of digital SLR photography purely rely on your camera's ability to interpret light. This of course will mean that that you have to comprehend light as well! Once you understand how light works through your camera you can then select the shutter speed and aperture that creates the photographs that you desire.

Once you master the basics of digital SLR photography you can then progress on to using tools to enhance your light. These tools can enhance and manipulate the appearance of light in your pictures. Using the flash is one such example of this. But I will leave this to another tutorial.

Your onboard light meter is a very imperative part of understanding light. Your internal light meter is a small indicator that you see when you look through the camera. When you place your dial on manual then the indicator will be more to the left or the right.

Based on what camera model you have the scale means there is too little or too much light. When the indicator is sitting in the center of the scale it means the camera thinks there is just the precise amount of light and you may confidently take the photo. To be proficient to master light effectively just start shooting in auto and write down the aperture and shutter speed that the camera has suggested. Then change your camera dial to manual and choose those same aperture and shutter speed settings. You will observe that those settings may not be the best ones that you once thought. Sometimes at those settings can create an image that is under exposed. This is why it is imperative to shoot using manual.

Learning how to use your SLR takes a bit training. The most ideal thing about digital photography is you can always remove the photos you don't want. Do not be fearful of making mistakes. Mistakes are catalysts for discovering new things. Once you realize how your camera interprets light then you will be free to become the skilled photographer you've always dreamed about.

Waterfall Photography Tips

August 2012: Focus Comp Results

 The winner of the August 2012 Focus Ezine Photography Competition has been announced!

Image copyright by Robin Tully.

Go here to see the results:

August 2012: Focus Comp Results

If you would like to take part in the competition then visit Focus Ezine 

Happy shooting!
Amy

I have updated my website- put a video on there now, what do you think?

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Waterfall Photography

Waterfall Photography

What Is Camera Raw?

Photo copyright by Amy Renfrey.

If you ever wondered if you should begin shooting in raw then the answer is yes. Raw photography offer us better quality and definition that Jpeg can't. Read the article on "what is camera raw" and never turn back!


Click on the link to discover: What Is Camera Raw?

Creating Sharp and Colourful Landscape Photography

Creating Sharp and Colourful Landscape Photography

How To Get Better Digital Photography Lighting- Introducing The Histogram

Recently I was asked by a subscriber of mine in New York State as to how he could improve his daylight digital photos to create a more even light across his digital photos. I suggested that in digital photography there were many tools such as a polariser, a Neutral Density Filter and some other fancy tools.

He said “I mean after the pictures has been taken. I really want my digital photography to turn out a lot better than what I am getting.”

What he was talking about was a digital photography method called post-editing. Post means “after” and editing…well you know what that means. And in digital photography as opposed to photography you can edit your photos so much easily than traditional film photography.
What I advised Grant was that he had a few options. He could try editing his digital photography images by increasing or decreasing the light values via the Histogram. The Histogram is probably one of your best friends in digital photography that you could ask for as far as post editing goes. In a nutshell you simply open up your digital photos in Adobe Photoshop. Then once you have done that you click on “image” up the top menu bar. Once the menu box has come up you then click on “adjust” and then “levels” and up comes the Histogram.

The Histogram will display the light values from the brightest part of your digital photo to the darkest parts. It displays this light & dark information in the form of a graph. It looks something you’d see on the stock market to measure the trends of stock over a certain period of time. You might see thin lines or a block of black shadow with peaks and troughs.

The right side of the reading of the Histogram represents the brighter colours. The left side represents the darker colours. You can pull the brightness down to create a more even light over the picture if you have several overexposed parts of your digital photo. Or alternatively if there are too many underexposed parts of your digital photo you can increase the brightness.
You can increase the brightness significantly by pulling the slider to the left. And you can do the opposite with the sliders to the right. By pulling the far left or far right slider, you’ll be increasing the contrast. By pulling the middle slider either side, you will have increased brightness or darkness but not so much contrast. You’ll see that this is an incredibly simple yet powerful post editing digital photography technique.

If you have a digital photo that is underexposed with the handy Histogram you can simply change the ‘luminance output levels’. As a result you’ll create a more evenly lit digital photo.

Happy shooting!
Amy Renfrey

High Dynamic Range In Digital Photography

If you have ever wanted to improve your digital photography then you may want to consider learning about High Dynamic Range. If you have heard of this term in digital photography, but are not sure what it is, then keep reading because it will serious change the way you look at your digital photography images. What High Dynamic range does in your digital photography is simultaneously lighten your underexposed areas and darken your overexposed areas. Working with your Dynamic Range will aim to create digital photography images as your own eye would see them; even light all over the scene.

In the digital photography world Dynamic Range simply refers to the range of light (luminance) vales from the darkest to brightest. In the real world is really the range of dark to bright sections of light that you can see with the naked eye. This is transferred to digital photography and it given the name Dynamic Range. Digital Photography Dynamic Range is the range of light on your digital camera sensor that can be captured without having the higher light or lower light values altered or edited. In digital photography speak High Dynamic Range simply means a higher range of light values.

You will notice that after understanding Dynamic Range that your digital photography can be improved dramatically and, very fast. Digital photography Dynamic range can improve aspects of your image such as adding a sense of drama to your cloudy landscapes, giving detail to lines of colour, toning down some overexposed parts of light sections of a digital image.

You may find that when photographing things outdoors in your digital photography such as landscapes, beach and snowscapes etc, you have a lot of contrasting highlights that slow your progress down. To overcome sections of high contrast you can use ND filters, a polariser, exposure bracketing, post editing in Photoshop etc, etc, the list goes on what you can do in digital photography but really, to get a more accurate exposure working with your Dynamic Range will be more effective.

You can get a good idea of digital photography Dynamic when you go outside and look at the light. For example High Dynamic Range is the bright sunlight on a typical outdoor, sunlit scene. In saying that, a Low Dynamic Range may correspond to darker areas such as a dimly lit room.

Let’s take my Sony digital camera to use as an example. It has 6 stops of Dynamic Range. The Dynamic range’s objectives are to capture more dynamic range. While it’s easy to capture daylight scenes with the Sony, in some instances like landscapes, more Dynamic Range might be needed. So in this case producing my High Dynamic Range requires that I take some separate exposures. Then I place all of the brightness levels that I want in my final image that my Sony’s sensor can record properly. What this means is putting the darkest values no lower than in the mid-range of the sensors light sensitivity range.

In the wonderful Adobe Photoshop I may decide to take a handful of exposures to cover the complete dynamic range. In each photo exposure I keep the aperture the same (changing aperture changes the depth of field). My aim here is to create different photos making sure that in each I cover the available brightness levels in the landscape.

I take a collection of photos of my landscape at about 1 stop changes in each photo. I don’t do this by altering the f stop I do this via my shutter speed. To check whether I’ve got variation in my exposures I can check the histogram to see whether I have adequately captured the scenes brightness.

Once I have all my exposures in the camera I go home and check it out in Adobe Photoshop. What I should be able to do then is edit them and create a picture as my own eye would see; good lighting on the foreground and good lighting on the background, without over exposure of the sky or underexposure of darker parts of the land.

Have fun and happy shooting!

Amy Renfrey

www.DigitalPhotographySuccess.com

Picture ©A. Syed

Submit article | Digital Camera Resource

Digital Photography Multiple Exposures

Digital Photography is one of the most creative hobbies you can partake in. And sometimes we reach a stage of evolution in our digital photography whereby we want another challenge, or another way to express our creativity. And, undoubtedly, along your digital photography path, you'll come across a technique called "Multiple Exposures."

Multiple Exposures is a technique in digital photography whereby you can create a really ingenious effect. You can add colour, darken images, shade whiter areas, change shapes via light alterations etc. It’s really a fun digital photography technique and can give you much scope. For example in digital photography sometimes you will find that noise can interfere with picture quality and with this technique you can tone down the effect of noise.

An example of multiple exposures is taking two digital photography images and each of them to be exposed by one F stop. For example, let’s say that the first digital photos 'correct' exposure is F 16. You can take the first photo at F11 and the second one at F 8.

However not all digital cameras offer the ability to create multiple exposures. The digital cameras that can offer multiple exposures are dslr's such as Fujifilm FinePix S1 Pro and S2 Pro. Can you create multiple exposures without having more expense of a camera in your digital photography? Good news; the answer is yes.

This is where Photoshop comes in. By adjusting a few things in Photoshop, your digital photography images can become more and more interesting. In Photoshop you can actually create the most beautiful multiple exposures.

One of the first things to do to try this digital photography technique is to make sure you have the right exposure compensation. I won't go into complicated scientific jargon (light is pretty complicated at a base scientific technique) but what I will say is it’s a precision in digital photography metering that mastery is required. Instead of worrying about this in great detail, just know that in order to get the correct exposure value you may need to apply bracketing to your digital photography images. You can use your manual setting along with the meter to get some images that are a little darker than you would normally have, just for the purpose of this technique.

With multiple exposures it’s not necessary to keep every single photo you take. If you want to give an image more of a certain colour or brightness you can simply bracket accordingly. You can think of this as gaining momentum. You will find that after a while, you look at new eyes towards your digital photography.

Next week: How To Create Digital Photography Multiple Exposures In Photoshop

If you want to learn how to take sensational digital photography like the pro's do just go to www.DigitalPhotographySuccess.com