Suwanee Morning Light

New Users Corner

Link to step one:

Step Two

Now you need to learn photographic techniques. The most important part of this is:

• Taking photographs
• Picking out your best of the week
• Getting honest criticism

Taking photographs is the easy part. Get your camera out and shoot. You will take thousands of shots before you really learn your camera and start to feel that you are in control of the process.

Now sort thru your work for the week, and pick out one or two and certainly no more than three of the shots that you feel are your best. Here is the first rule of photography:

Only show other people your best work

Whatever you do don’t go out shoot a hundred shots, post them all on Flickr and then expect others to wade thru them, bad mixed in with the good.

You, or at least I, will always produce a lot of photos that I don’t think are very good and mixed in will be a few shots that are good. If I am having a very good day I might get 50% keepers, more often it could be 25% good to 75% not so good. Be your own worst critic.  Ansel Adams sort of confesses this:

“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” Ansel Adams

In others words he was happy with one good shot a month. We can have lower standards however and try for one or two a week. Edward Weston, another very famous photographer, has a very well known shot, Pepper Number 30. Thirty implies that there were at least 29 other pepper shots that he didn’t show people.

If you are new at this, do not expect to produce masterworks on your first efforts, or even your two thousandth effort. Find your best shots. Don’t look at the work of people who have been doing this for a long time and despair. You will get better as you go but you won’t get better unless you get some idea about what you need to do to improve. So put your work out for critiques even if you don’t think they are very good. After all that is when you can get the most from criticism. A good group of critics will know that you are just starting and will help you in any way that they can.

Find someone who will give you honest criticism. This isn’t your wife, your husband or your mother. All of them are more worried about insulting you than they are about giving good criticism. And of course unless you are lucky enough to have a good photographer in the family they don’t know what a good photograph is, anyway. They think that what they get from their point and shoots are good.

In today’s networked world one of the best places to find good criticism is on the net and in particular Yahoo groups. There are some very good mailing lists which run photo assignments and give excellent criticism. Honest criticism which will tell you what is technically right and wrong with your work. You must approach this with the right attitude; you want them to tell you what is technically and artistically wrong, and hopefully what they like about the image.

Let me climb up on my stump for a paragraph or two:

If you ask for critiques of your best work of the week, and you are given good advice. Do not be defensive. The advice may be good or it may be bad. Always thank the person who gave it to you and either to put it to use or ignore it. If you get into an argument and get the reputation of not taking good advice, people will cut you off. I do when I run into people like that. I add them to my blocked list and never hear from them again. Remember that you may not recognize good advice when you see it.

I also ignore people who post an unending stream of photographs, three or four a day, sometimes more. Who has time for that?

These people are spending their personal time trying to help you. They do not want to be insulted or argued with. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t ask for further information if they haven’t been clear. You should. But do it in a pleasant way.  You will occasionally find jerks who are insulting. Ignore them if possible. Find another list if you cannot. OK enough lecturing on list etiquette.

Some lists that I know of or others have suggested:

Canon: the Digital Rebels

and their photo site

The Rebels do pictures of the week and also have assignments that everyone can contribute to. This is a low conflict group and does not tolerate any sort of harsh behavior.

Nikon: the Nikon D80 group

and the Nikonians which while apparently a good group has started charging $25/year for membership. That includes gallery space. You can join for the first month free. Even at $25 a year it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, most people on the Digital Rebel list end up joining PBase to get gallery space, and that costs $23/year.

I didn’t get any suggestions for Sony Pentax or Olympus groups but I found these:

• Alphausers
• PentaxKdSLR
• My Olympus
• Olympus E System

A hat tip to Maria, she suggested the two Olympus groups above. I found nothing for Sigma. The Sony and Pentax groups are very small and that may be good or bad depending on how the group functions the Digital Rebels has 2200 members and the Nikon group has 1100 by way of contrast. If anyone knows of other good groups leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list. Without any editorial comment I’ll suggest staying away from the Canon 300D list on Yahoo.

There are a number of general groups that do critiques and are not limited to a particular camera brand. PhotoSig is well known. The people on it have a reputation of being quite sharp with the critical pen.  So judge the thickness of your skin before venturing there. The Photo Critique forum is another and I have heard nothing about it, good or bad. DPReview forums have some critique sections and they also cover a lot of camera brands if you need some camera specific advice.

And by using Google you can probably find a lot of other sites. None of these lists or sites will help you if you never post and become what is known as a lurker. Introduce yourself and ask questions.

Composition

Another thing that will help you develop a good photographer’s eye is learning something about composition and the ‘rules of composition‘. Now the idea of rules really seems to bother some people. These rules or maybe principals is a better term have come down to us mainly from the painting world and have been taught to painters down thru the ages, or at least for hundreds of years. Of course the modern ‘painters’ have little use for these since they are taught that stringing toilet paper across a park is ‘art’ and thus no knowledge of composition is needed.

But I believe that these rules are derived from centuries of study on just what attracts people to a particular work and what they unconsciously look for in the work when they see it. Modern studies have been done on what people look at and they have found that you have less than one second to attract someone’s attention before they lose interest. So use your one second wisely by studying the rules of composition and getting people to spend more of their time on your images.

Once you master composition then you are free to start ignoring the ‘rules’ if you think there is a good reason to do so.

A great aggregation site for composition articles is PhotoInf. Try the Wendy Folse series for a start and just browse thru some of the other articles. This is a good site to return to once in awhile to read a different view of composition.

Books

You will probably acquire a library of photography books as you advance in your study of photography. Bryan Peterson’s books have a wide following and his Understanding Exposure  is especially well known. It is well worth the $17 or so that it costs on Amazon.

Scott Kelby has popular books on Digital Photography: the Digital Photography Book volumes one and two. These are big sellers but I haven’t heard any reports by people who have read them. Kelby can be a very flippant writer and his style is not so popular with a large number of people. I find that his books are packed with information and you can skip the chapter introductions where he packs most of what he considers humor.  I do have some Kelby Photoshop books and thought they were worth the money.

There are literally thousands of other books available but at this stage one or two good ones will be all that you probably need.

A Place to post your work

You will soon need a place that you can post shots so people can see them. Some forums have their own group site. The Digital Rebels, the Nikonians and PhotoSig all do. But sooner or later you will want a place of your own. One place a lot of photographers use is PBase.  It costs $23 a year and comes with a lot of storage, 500MB at this time. Many people like it since it lets you control how your work appears, has easy navigation and has many photographers using it. It does come with warts tho.

Flickr is free but has awful navigation and poor presentation of your work IMO. Many people refuse to look at shots posted on Flickr. It does have very strong internal groups if you get involved with them.

Zenfolio is a newer service that is adding a lot of features. It seems to be reasonably priced at $25-40/year. SmugMug is another service that is a bit more expensive and the site navigation is disliked by some people. Lastly Wikipedia has an article listing many more sites worldwide that you can explore. One thing to be careful of is the sites terms of use, you never want to give up the rights to your work by using one of these sites.  Some notorious rights thieves are Facebook and MySpace.

Summing Up

• So go out:
• Take many photographs
• Find someone to critique them
• Study Composition
• Read a book or two.

Next up learning to edit your shots and using raw.

Big Cypress

New Users Corner

It’s here

Your spiffy new DSLR has arrived and you are wondering, what next? Naturally you will charge up the battery and head out to do some shooting. But if you are new to DSLR cameras the results may be disappointing when compared to your old point and shoot.

Why is that true? Because unlike P&S cameras, DSLR cameras demand that you do a lot of the thinking that the camera did for you when you used the less powerful model. DSLRs are not just bigger and more expensive point and shoot cameras even though camera manufacturers advertise them as if that was the case.

If you feel a burning desire to buy some things for the camera then get a couple of extra batteries, Sterlingtek is a good place to find them at less than a quarter of the cost from your manufacturer. You can find them on Amazon and eBay too but won’t know who you are buying them from.

A couple of extra memory cards is a good idea. 4 GB is a good size to my way of thinking. That will usually hold a day’s casual shooting but it doesn’t hold so many shots that it would be a disaster if something happened to the card. If it gets lost or ruined in some way. NewEgg is a good source as is Amazon.

If you are using the high speed UDMA Flash cards then you will want a fast UDMA Card Reader. Otherwise a slower but cheaper USB2 Card Reader will do. I never have thought it makes much sense to use your $1000 camera to do the job a $18 card reader can do faster.

Getting a Cleaning Kit is also a good idea. I like the Giotto Rocket blower as the first line of defense against dust on your sensor.

I would wait to buy lenses or other major accessories. You of course need to decide what you need and when. But the way you look at these items may change a good deal in the next few months. You could buy something and then come to regret the purchase as you learn more.

The three steps

So to become master of your new camera and to learn good photographic technique you need a plan of action. And I have a three step plan for you:

• Step one–learn how your camera works.
• Step two–learn basic photographic technique.
• Step three–learn post process editing for your files

By taking this process in small bites you can make noticeable progress and see that your photographic skills are improving.

Step One

Learning how your camera works can be a tedious process. The first and really vital step in this process is to do the dreaded: read the manual. Find a quiet place where you can have an hour or so alone and get the manual in your hands and the camera in your lap. Read a section of the manual and then find the things that were mentioned on your camera that you have in your lap. Try the different functions and menu items. Do this a section at a time, it may take several sessions.

Now you will not remember all this stuff. But you will recall that there was a way to do something that you are puzzled about and you will be able to find it in the manual weeks later. I carried the book in my camera bag for the first year after I got my first DSLR. And should still be carrying it since I frequently need to look up items four years later.

I have heard of people photographing the manual and saving it on a memory card so that they can pop the card into the camera and read that section on the LCD. That was a step too far for me.

I actually worked on doing a section a week for months. I’d work on recalling how to set focus points one week, and I’d do white balance the following week. Even tho I had 20 years of using SLR cameras, before I bought my first DSLR, all these complex functions were new to me.

While this is going on, visit your camera manufacturers website. They will have a lot of training material available. Usually in short video clips.

• Canon Digital Learning Center
• Nikon Digital Learning Center
• Sony Tutorials
• Olympus Digital School
• Pentax Pentaxian site

If your manual is just too confusing there are third party books on a lot of camera models. I have not read any of these but I have occasionally heard comments from people who seemed to find them useful.

• Short Courses
• Digital Field Guides
• Magic Lantern Guides

And you can just get on Amazon and search for your camera model in books or videos.

Shoot, shoot and shoot some more

While all this is going on, keep on shooting. The more the better, and look at your work after you have a shooting session. Think about how you could improve your images. Remember once you have a digital camera it costs you nothing to take photos. I estimate that it took me 1500 shots or more before I thought that I had a basic grasp of camera operation.

During this step I think you are better off learning about your camera than you would be trying to learn shooting modes. However using jpeg modes on your camera teaches you nothing. What does the camera do exactly when you put it in night mode or sports mode? Most likely you won’t have any idea, and how can you learn from that?

So I suggest putting your camera in program mode, your camera may call it P mode. That is something for you to check in your manual. The camera will also probably select focus settings for you. Leave the other settings at default settings unless you have a reason to change them.

Set the file size to large jpeg and you may want to think about using the raw+jpeg file option if your camera supports that. This might be especially important if you are shooting some event that is important to you. The camera will then save two copies of each image file. One as a large jpeg and one as a raw file. Don’t worry about the raw files now, but later when you learn how to post process your images, you could go back and reprocess those shots. So just save those files for the time being. For now just use the jpeg files to email or get prints made.

The camera will probably set the metering mode to evaluative which is fine at this stage. Concentrate on learning to frame shots and understanding your camera.

OK are we ready to move on to the next step? That will be in the next post.

Killdeer

The New User Corner

Buying a lens

Buying a lens is a serious project, or at least it should be. Camera bodies come and they go after a few years. But a good lens will outlast many bodies. There are plenty of photographers who are still using lenses on their new DSLR that they may have bought back in the 1990’s or even earlier for a film SLR. Thus you should buy the best lens that you can fit into your budget. Waiting until you save money to get a better lens is often better than buying a cheaper low quality lens now.

However there is an active market for used lenses so you can probably sell a less worthy lens for a good fraction of what you originally paid for it. I unwisely bought a Canon 55-200mm lens when I bought my first DSLR ( a Canon 350D and that lens is not the current version with IS). I think I paid a bit over $200 for it and was able to sell it a couple years later for $155 on eBay. So you can correct early lens buying mistakes without a lot of pain.

What do I look at when buying a new lens?

• Focal Length
• Lens optical quality
• Maximum aperture
• Autofocus speed
• Build quality
• Other factors like weight, IS, and noise. And always price.

Focal length

What usually prompts me to start thinking about buying a new lens is when I notice a gap in my lens collection. Or if I feel that one of my current lenses has some blemish on its desirability in my eyes. My last lens purchase was to replace a current lens which I felt had too much flare and ugly hard to edit out flare at that. But I would think that focal length or focal length range in the case of a zoom, would be the most common reason that people decide that they need a new lens.

I have heard from some people who think that they must have a lens that covers every possible millimeter of range from the ultrawide to the long telephoto. I don’t really think that’s true. Right now I have an ultrawide 11-16mm Tokina and the next lens up in my collection is a 50mm prime. I don’t feel any burning desire to cover that gap from 16mm to 50mm. That is what feet are for. You can walk nearer or farther away from a subject and cover the gap without the expense of adding another lens to carry around with you, which will make your camera bag that much heavier too.

Just a note I am going to cover the various lens focal ranges in another post.

Once you have decided on a focal length range it is time to start searching the review sites. Some of the ones I use frequently are:

• Fred Miranda
• Photodo
• Photozone
• Digital Picture

Fred Miranda’s reviews are all user reviews and as such you have to read them in bulk and not accept any one review as being too important. I always assume that someone who is angry about some product is more likely to get online and write a nasty review than someone who is satisfied is likely to get online and write a favorable review. But that being said, if I see a high number of nasty comments I tend to take them seriously. Fred Miranda seems to have an undeserved bad reputation among Nikon users.

Photodo and Photozone reviews are more technical and are based on actual objective testing. So they will give you an idea of the quality of the lens. Digital Picture is oriented towards the Canon equipment line and has spotty coverage. There are a number of other test sites and using google with the lenses model designation will find more reviews. I also check out the manufacturer’s sites:

• Canon
• Nikon
• Sigma
• Tamron
• Tokina

I guess a word or two about lens manufacturers is called for here. You first source for lenses is your camera manufacturer. Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Olympus and others. But third party manufacturers have cracked the camera manufacturer’s codes and produce good lenses. I feel that with the highest grades of lenses from Canon and Nikon those companies are still producing the best lenses. That would be the Canon L grade lenses and the equivalent Nikons. I do not know enough about the other camera manufacturers to comment on their lens quality.

Many of the lens manufacturers provide MTF diagrams on their lenses and look at those can help you judge the lens quality. This is a semi-technical undertaking and the charts were produced by the lens manufacturers so have to be taken with that in mind. The not so technical among us may prefer to skip MTF charts.

Below the top grade lines of lenses the third party companies are in the race with Canon and Nikon producing some very good glass and just like Canon and Nikon producing some junk grade lenses too. You absolutely need to carefully research the lenses you are thinking about buying. No matter who makes them.  They all make bad glass and you don’t want to be stuck with one of those.

The third party companies do have a certain reputation. Sigma has been historically fairly safe to buy from but recently they have been getting a lot of complaints about the quality control of their telephotos. One lens rental company has stopped carrying Sigma glass because of the high level of complaints. This situation may have already turned itself around. Tamron has had a reputation of having poor quality control in the past but may be getting better. Tokina has had the reputation of producing ‘built like a tank’ quality lenses but with less than stellar image quality. They still make well built glass but have produced a number of excellent high quality lenses recently. They have the smallest number of models in their inventory however.

Those comments are just based on my subjective observations and may or may not be true at any particular time. You should form your own opinions. And they are not meant to discourage you from buying from third party manufacturers. I own lenses from Canon, Sigma and Tokina and very much like the ones I have. Tamron just never floated to the top when I was done making my evaluations but they do seem to make some nice consumer grade zooms. I just haven’t been interested in those lens ranges.

All of the companies do have a reputation of taking lenses back and recalibrating them or replacing them fairly promptly. But this should make you want to buy from a vendor with the highest reputation so you’ll have someone else to complain to, if you have a problem.

You can also seek advice from Yahoo groups if you are a member of a list there or from local camera clubs if you are lucky enough to have one near you. The least useful source of information is a camera store or big box store. The salesmen get higher bonuses for selling certain products and are thus likely to push those on unwary buyers. You may be lucky and have a camera salesmen, that you know, who is highly ethical.

Magazines also publish reviews but these have to be read carefully. The magazines live by selling advert space and they are not going to enrage a big advertiser by writing an overtly bad review. But if you read the reviews with this in mind they often drop lots of hints. Phrases like the ‘best that can be expected of a lens in this class‘. Faint praise in other words means it is a piece of junk, stay away from it.

Lens optical quality.

Lens quality and cost are somewhat related. You can expect that a better quality lens will cost more since higher quality and more expensive materials are used to make it. Exotic glasses and difficult to grind lens curves are also more likely to be used. Take a look at this video to see what goes into making a $6400 lens. There are several other videos in the set.

The same review sites above will also give you an idea of the lens quality. Lens contrast is also an important part of the optical quality. Some very expensive lenses have the reputation of producing low contrast images. Lenses can also add slight color casts. Some have a reputation of producing ‘warm’ images for example.

Maximum aperture.

The larger (which actually means the smaller the number is) maximum aperture of the lens is also tied to its price. Faster glass costs more and the lens will be heavier. The Canon 70-200mm f/4L lens costs about $600 while the f/2.8L faster version costs $1200. One extra stop doubles the cost of that lens. It also changes the weight from 1.56 pounds to 2.8 pounds.

Better lenses also have a fixed aperture, those lenses above are always f/4 or f/2.8 no matter what their zoom position is. Cheaper lenses will have variable apertures which generally get slower as the lens is zoomed out. Consumer grade telephotos will often start at f/4 at their low end and as you zoom the lens out they will change aperture up to f/5.6. This makes them more difficult to use in low light situations.

Another linked feature is that better lenses usually have non-rotating elements which means that a filter used on the lens will not rotate when you focus the lens. Cheaper lenses will sometime have rotating elements which means that filter will move and you will have to reset it every time you focus. That is important if you use polarizing or special effect filters.

Autofocus speed.

Autofocus speed is how fast a lens focuses. If you are trying to track a flying bird or a running child you want fast autofocus speed. Again better grade lenses often but not always have faster autofocus speed. Some very expensive lenses are notoriously slow to focus and if that is important to you, then check it out carefully. Macro lenses are one class of lenses which often are not quick to focus but most people feel that is less important in that type of lens.

Build Quality.

Like other features this generally tracks price. Some manufacturers have a better reputation, at least in their better grade of lenses. Canon, Nikon and Tokina make sturdy lenses. But it can vary from model to model so check out the one you are interested in. Sometimes you just accept a cheap build quality to get a good optical lens and a low price. The Canon and Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lenses are examples of this. Plastic construction, good optics, and very low prices make these good buys.

Other factors.

There are a lot of other factors that may influence your decision. Is the lens really noisy, some are. Noisy in this case means loud. Does it have IS (if your camera uses lens based IS). I don’t think IS is all that important in shorter lenses but once you get to 200mm and beyond it gets to be very important. The weight of a lens can be an issue. That Canon 70-200 mm f/2.8 IS version weighs 3.5 pounds. Add that to the Canon 5D mk2 body which weighs 2 pounds and you are holding the equivalent of a 5 pound bag of potatoes up to your eye and hanging it from your neck all day.

How the lens focus and zoom rings work can be an issue. Some lenses un-spool and run out to their longest focal length when they hang down. That can be irritating.

And of course price can be very important. No matter how much that Canon 600mm f/4L seems to be exactly what you need, that $6400 price may keep you (and me) from getting one.

Summing up.

So buying a lens can be a long process. But it is one I usually enjoy. It gives me an excuse to search all of those sites. I usually start out with a general idea what I’m looking for, a ultrawide zoom or a long telephoto for example and narrow the list down to 3 or 4 possibilities. Then I use the review sites to focus in on one or two models. I usually ask on a Canon list or two to get thoughts from people I know.

All this takes months for me. I often make a decision but have to start saving up to get what I want. But it is all worth the effort if you get a great lens that you will still be using 10 years from now.