Went out for a fall photoshoot with Emily. You can view the results below.
These were all taken using one camera and one lens, one off camera flash (SB-600) using radio triggers along with an umbrella or a grid snoot.
I don’t do prints or film processing myself, especially in large quantities, the reason is I don’t have the room or equipment to pump the stuff out, and doing anything more complex than black and white in a darkroom would not yield good results. So for large print jobs and film processing (Slide or Black and White) I use Henry’s (www.henrys.com).
Today, I realized why I keep using them, I went into the Oakville store, where I do a majority of my business with the company, I just greeted the clerk on the front counter with my usual Hello and Smile, and she immediately knew why I had come into the store, and reached out to pull the two rolls of film I had in for processing, and had them rung up by the time I was at the counter. That’s customer service, and why I’ll keep using Henry’s.
The Film turned out beautifully also.
In my original post I reviewed the various choices of lenses available to those who use a interchangeable lens camera such as Single Lens Reflex camera, and those using Micro 4/3rds systems. (Sorry P&S and Prosumer users, this one isn’t really for you). So now that you have your amazing collection of glass in your collection, we can start picking and choosing for various situations.
Landscapes
The choice for this one is obvious, you’re going to be looking for a wide or ultra wide angle lens, this will easily help you capture the vastness of the shot. If you’re going for a more interesting look, especially with a cityscape, you may even choose a fisheye lens to get that rounded look. Occationally you can use a longer lens for landscape work, the photo that makes up the banner for this blog was taken using a 50mm lens on a crop sensor (so a 75mm focal length), but I was fairly distance from my subject and pulled off a wonderfully sharp shot.
Nikon F80 ~ Tameron 11-18mm 1:4.5-5.6 DiII @ 18mm (true 18mm as it’s a 35mm camera)
Architecture
This is the area of photography that I cut my teeth on. In this case again you’re going to be working with ultra-wide and wide angles for the most part here as you’ll want to capture the whole room in your shot, and when working with crop sensor bodies, your 24mm lens won’t really cut it anymore. I found this out when I first switched to a Digital SLR with a crop sensor. I still take time to go and capture the abandoned buildings that I travel far and wide for, and my ultra-wide lens is usually with me. But in many cases, I leave my versatile 17-55mm lens on my camera for ease of use and keeps the switching of lenses inside these buildings to a minimum.
Nikon D70s ~ Sigma 18-50mm @ 18mm (27mm with the crop factor).
Portrait
The main mistake that many people make when it comes to portrait work is that they use a wide angle lens, then zoom with their feet. Because they need to get that full body shot, so they zoom out to the widest they can go, and stand fairly close to the subject. Trust me, this is not flattering.
A rather brutal example of this, is my friend Alex here. I used a 10-20mm lens, set to 10mm, as you can see I got up rather close to focus on the head and shoulders area, it’s rather distorted, in this case it is a neat effect for a fun off the cuff shot, but this would not cut it for a professional portrait shot.
Nikon D300 ~ Sigma 10-20mm @ 10mm
If this was a more professional shot, I would have picked a longer focal length, 50mm or greater, and stood up higher, to keep everything in the correct proportions. So when going for a portrait work, stick to prime lenses with a focal length (before or after a crop) of 50mm or greater. I regularly use my 35mm lens to do group shots when I don’t have a lot of room to work with. That is the one downside to all this, you do need more room the longer of a lens you are working with.
Nikon D300 ~ Nikon 85mm
As you can see, similar to Alex as before, but now Amy is wonderfully proportioned, in this case I had some room to play with being on the streets, my 70-200mm lens would work great for this as well.
Event/Photojournalism/Street
This niche of photography is really dependent on the whole situation. I’ve used both Prime and Zoom lenses to shoot events and out on the street, and I’ve found that I gravitate more towards the long zoom lens, mostly because it gives you more freedom to catch the event or action as it happens in a candid manner. So grab a telephoto for this so you can keep yourself both in the action and yet just outside so that they don’t see the lens focusing in on them almost causing them to stage the action.
Nikon D300 ~ Nikon 135mm
I used a prime lens for this particular event, a protest for and against the Israel invasion of the Gaza strip earlier this year. It worked really well for a manual focus lens.
Macro
This isn’t really my area of photography, but many manufactures produce specialized lenses for the purpose of photographing things close up and detailed.
I do keep a Macro lens in my collection, but I don’t think I’m going to be keeping it much longer as I don’t use it.
You’re probably wondering why Weddings isn’t mentioned in this list, because a wedding is a merger of two general types, event and portrait, so pick your lenses appropriately. If you really want to you can get away with only two lenses for weddings, a wide to normal (17-55mm) and a telephoto (70-200mm) and that would have you covered.
At the beginning of October I got to work with a wonderful aspiring model, Amy. We took to the streets of Lindsay, ON to do a quick photoshoot. The fun part about working in small towns is that it does attract the attention of the locals, who were very curious about what exactly we were doing. Kent Street provided an excellent backdrop, from the historic downtown to the ruins of the old mill.
