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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.

Good Morning, and welcome back. I was thinking last night how to improve and expand on things I post here, and came up with the idea to do a series of posts titled “Mastering the Basics” sort of a refresher course for photographers and myself in creating these. There will probably be some sprinklings of technical and slang terms in here, but I hope I have explained them well. If you have questions feel free to leave a comment and I’ll work on explaining things further or answering them.

So why not start right at the beginning on how a camera works.

Here are two examples of Nikon cameras. The one on the left is a Nikon F3, the Professional camera from the 1980s, on the right is a Nikon D300, my current main camera. Now the question is, do these two camera work in the same way?

Yes, they do.

One fact that is often lost is that all cameras, from the very first camera to the latest and greatest work on the exact same principle. Light, reflected off an object is directed through a lens or hole onto a light sensitive recording medium, and stored. The only difference is what the medium is and how it’s stored. In the case of the F3, it uses Film, which both records the image and stores it. The D300 using a sensor and then stores the image on a Compact Flash card. Yes, even your point and shoot camera works with these same principles.

Controlling Light. As I mentioned earlier, a camera directs light through a lens onto a light sensitive medium. If you just let all the light into the camera onto the medium you’ll just be seeing white. Lots of white. This is why you need to control the light being recorded. There are three things that do this, they are aperture size, shutter speed, and senstivity.

Aperture controls the amount of light going in, shutter speed determines how long the light is let in, and sensitivity determines how receptive to light the medium is.

Aperture: when you look at an eye, notice how in bright light the pupil goes smaller and in darkness opens wide, the camera’s aperture works in the same way.

When you look at the lens you’ll often see a series of numbers and letters. Of course there’s the 105mm, this is the focal length. But the one that we’re going to focus on is the 1:2.5. This indicates the maximum aperture the lens has, or how wide open it can go, these numbers are called F-Stops they are also written as f/2.5 or f/4. You might also see 1:3.5-4.5, this means that the maximum aperture is variable based on the focal length, this is often found on point and shoot lenses, or lower end zoom lenses. So while at the one end of the focal length you might have a maximum aperture of f/3.5 when you zoom all the way in, you’ll only have a maximum aperture of f/4.5. The lower the number the larger the maximum aperture, so a lens marked 1:1.8 will be able to let in a lot more light than a lens marked 1:5.6, so the f/1.8 lens is called faster. But the more open the aperature is the less of the photo will be in focus, this is called depth of field, which I will discuss in a later posting.

Shutter Speed: The shutter is often a piece of cloth or metal that protects the light sensitive material, the shutter speed determines how long this curtain is open. This speed is often listed in fractions of a second, noted by a quote mark so 1/60″ would indicate that the shutter was open for one sixtieth of a second or 30″ would indicate the shutter was open for thirty seconds. On average a person can shoot at speeds of 1/60″ or faster (1/100″ ect), this eliminates the appearance of camera shake in your images. See the photo below.

This is an example is a little extreme (6.4″ shutter speed), but shows off what camera shake is, most people will see this when shooting at speeds around 1/30″ or slower (1/15″). Of course camera manufactures have been working on new ways to assist by installing Image Stabilization (There are many names for this, Nikon uses VR or “Vibration Reduction”) on lenses or in camera.

Sensitivity to Light: As the name suggests it is how sensitivity to light the medium is. There’s really no real way to explain it. This sensitivity is measured on a scale known as ISO numbers (pronounced Eye-Ss-Oh, not eye-so). The higher the number, the more sensitive to light the medium is. However there are drawbacks to using a higher ISO, you get more grain (or noise in the digital world), this is noticeable aberrations in your images.

So combining aperture size, shutter speed, and sensitivity is how the camera determines how the light is captured. The real trick comes with choosing how to use all three in concert. But that will come with later posts, and a little more about manipulating the each setting to get the look you want.