Archives For Canon

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Hey, Dad… Is This Close Enough?

Varina Patel —  December 11, 2012


My dad used to tell me to “get in close” when I was taking pictures with his sturdy little Pentax, K1000. It was good advice! When I’m shooting, I’m often thinking about how I can get close and fill my frame with my subject. I took this shot with a Canon 180mm macro lens. The greatest challenge when shooting macro is getting the focus just right – especially when you are outdoors and working with windy conditions – or a moving subject. In this case, I used a wide aperture (f/5) to capture a very narrow depth of field. This serves to eliminate the details in the background for a simpler image.

In post processing, I check my color balance carefully to make sure the greens looked natural. Then, I used my Wacom graphics tablet and stylus to draw a really quick selection around the tip of the grass and the water droplet. I feathered the selection, created a mask on a duplicated layer, and then sharpened the layer. The mask let me target my sharpening to the areas that needed it – leaving the background nice and soft.

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90mmTS

Review: 90mm F2.8 TS-E lens

Jay Patel —  November 17, 2011

For our recent trip to Iceland, we rented a couple of lenses once again – from LensRentals.com. Their service was excellent, as always. We placed the order a couple of weeks before we left, and the lenses arrived clean and in perfect condition – in plenty of time for us to get them packed up and ready to go. We highly recommend their services – and we know several other photographers who’ve rented from them as well. I haven’t heard any complaints yet! Renting lenses is a great way to get your hands on a lens to try it out before making an expensive purchase.

So, let’s get to it!

A tilt shift lens is a specialty lens that allows the photographer to control perspective without tilting the camera – instead, they can actually tilt the elements within the lens itself. You can also adjust the plane of focus so that everything within the plane is in sharp focus… or so that only a small area is in focus. Here’s a nice little video from Digital Rev TV that gives a really nice, basic overview of what you can do with one of these lenses.

http://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalRevCom#p/search/0/0HRYlJUwzYA

This is a very compact and light-weight lens that comes with an integrated lens hood. It is one of the sharpest prime lenses we have used – it’s beautifully sharp even wide open. The lens is really solid – it’s well built, and made to last… which is pretty important, since it’s selling for about $1300.00. (Yet another reason to rent!)

There’s very little distortion with this lens, and you shouldn’t have problems with flare unless you are shooting directly into the sun. One of the drawbacks of this lens is that the axis of shift and the axis of tilt remained locked with respect to one another….we hope Canon will choose to correct this issue with newer models. And the knobs are also really little! Which makes them a bit difficult to adjust if your fingers aren’t very small.

A T/S lens can be used in variety of creative ways to capture images. Rather than focusing on the technical aspects of how to use the lens, we want to point out some of the creative ways you can use it.

First of all – it can be used just like any other lens… here’s a shot I took using LiveView to manually focus. (It’s important to note that this lens does not have auto-focus capabilities.) Because it’s a compact lens, I was able to sprint a half-mile with my camera and tripod to capture the gorgeous light over the mountains in Iceland.

On of our favorite uses for this lens is in creating panoramas. The process is simple. You set up your first shot as you would normally – and snap a photo. Then, you adjust the lens along it’s shift axis to the left and right to complete the panorama. Here is an example of a panorama series. After the images were captured, we combine them in Photoshop for the finished effect.

Another interesting aspect of the TS lens is it’s ability to isolate a subject by adjusting the plane of focus. The shot you see below shows how tilting the lens axis blurs the area in front of and behind the subject. This is a neat way to isolate a subject within the frame.

 

This lens is great for photographing small objects – think how cool it would be to shift your plane of focus so that all the petals of the flower you are shooting are within the plane of focus… without shooting the flower from above! We loved it for super-sharp panoramas and isolating subjects within the field of view. We don’t recommend the lens if you don’t feel comfortable with a learning curve. Tilt shift lenses are very different from conventional lenses, and making the most of them requires practice and experimentation! If you are up for a challenge – rent one and see how you like it! I think we’ll rent this one again… it’s entirely too much fun to play with!

TS/E lenses offer an incredible opportunity to explore your creative side. What would you do if you get your hands on one? :)

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300f4

Review: Canon Telephoto EF 300mm f/4.0L IS Lens

Varina Patel —  September 22, 2011

Jay and I wanted to be able to photograph the wildlife in Glacier National Park – but our lens collection is geared towards wide-angle landscapes and macro photography. For shooting wildlife – especially when you can’t (or don’t want to) get too close to your subject – you want to have a long lens. But lenses are expensive – so rather than purchasing one we won’t use regularly, we rented a Canon 300mm f/4.0 from LensRentals.com. Of course, we didn’t think about renting a lens until the last minute (go figure), so we weren’t sure they could get it to us on time. We emailed to find out if they could do it, and they assured us they could. We put in the order Monday afternoon, requested overnight shipping, and the lens arrived Tuesday afternoon… so it was packed and ready in plenty of time for our 4am departure Wednesday morning.

I have to say, we were really impressed with LensRental.com – the service was excellent, the website was clean and easy to navigate, and the ordering process was simple. The lens was clean and in perfect condition when it arrived. And perhaps most importantly, their prices are more than reasonable. You can expect to pay extra for overnight shipping, of course – but they ship two-day standard… so plan a little better than we did, and you won’t have to take on that extra expense.

So, I know what you’re thinking (because I’m a little bit psychic)… you’re wondering why we didn’t choose a longer lens… or a wider one… or a zoom. Actually, the 300mm f/4.0 is perfect for us. It’s small enough to fit neatly in our camera bag – 22.1 cm long (8.7 in) without the lens hood extended, and weighing in at 1.19 kg (2.62 lb). That’s important since we do a lot of hiking and we don’t want to be lugging around a huge lens everywhere we go. It’s also smaller and lighter than the f2.8 version. As for zoom capability – we just don’t need it. We can use the lens on a full frame body for a 300mm focal length, or put it on our 1.6 crop factor body for 480mm. If we need more length, we can add our 1.4x extension tube – for a total focal length equivalent to 672mm… and that’s more than enough for our needs. When we are on location, we don’t want to bring more than we need. The 300mm f/4.0 was just right.

 

All right – let’s get down to the good stuff. This is one gorgeous lens. It’s an L-series (L is for Luxury) lens with first generation Image Stabilization capability. It’s beautifully sharp and quick to focus… which is great when your subject isn’t likely to hold still for long. It also has an integrated lens hood – easy to store and no fumbling with the dang thing when you need it. It just slides right into position. Image stabilization has two modes – one for dual-axis camera-shake correction, and one that handles a single axis for use when panning. In the latter case, the lens will automatically determine your panning direction – pretty cool. Minimum focusing distance is 1.50 m (4.92 ft).

Take a look at this shot of a ground squirrel. (No – not that photo… that’s Jay. The one below!) It’s incredibly sharp, and the soft background is a testament to the beauty of shooting with a wide aperture. You can see that f/4.0 is wide enough to get that soft background, but we’re still getting enough depth of field to get the animal in sharp focus. I took this shot from about ten yards away – and cropped a bit to get the squirrel out of the center.

Glacier National Park - Montana, USA

And here’s a 100% crop to show you how much detail we are getting out of this lens… click to see it full size. Keep in mind that this is completely un-sharpened. (Image Specs: f/4.0, 1/400, ISO 200) The finished image above has been prepared for web viewing and sharpened accordingly.

Take a look at some of the other photos we took with this lens during the trip…
The Bighorn Sheep were gathered near the Logan Pass visitor center on our first evening in the park. (Image Specs: f/4.0, 1/80, ISO 400) Jay took this shot with a tripod – be sure to turn off the Image Stabilization if you are using an IS lens on a tripod.

A few minutes later, a family of Elk wandered into the area. Jay took a few photographs in the fading light. (Image Specs: f/4.0, 1/160, ISO 1600) Even at a high ISO, the photos look excellent!

You can get creative with this lens, too – it’s not just for wildlife portraits. While waiting for construction vehicles to move aside, we took a few photos of the wildflowers blooming on the mountainsides. (Image Specs: f/6.3, 1/800, ISO 200)

And last – but not least – here’s a shot that just makes me smile. (Image Specs: f/4.0, 1/400, ISO 100) Sometimes the wildlife ham it up for the camera.

Glacier National Park - Montana, USA

To sum it all up – this is a beauty of a lens. Relatively lightweight, great for wildlife and other creative shots, and so so sharp. What’s not to love? And once we were home, we packed the lens back up in the box it arrived in, slapped on the shipping label LensRental.com provided, and dropped it off at UPS for shipping. Now, I’m ready to rent a couple of tilt-shift lenses for Iceland! We’ll write up reviews for those when we return!

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