G’day welcome back to my blog, Today I’ll cover my first L lens I got and the one I thought I’d be talking about last week my 100 f2.8 L Macro lens, When I first got this one I was a permanent fixture to my camera I sued it for everything, the difference from the old kit lens I had left over from my 350D was amazing, The quality of the images coming out of it was so much sharper and clear. It became my default lens for quite some time. The lens is a macro lens and it is the lens used on all my Mushroom shots, (You can check these out in my mushroom gallery under the portfolio tab) The closest I can put a subject to the lens is about the distance you can get when you use the lens hood, which I always use on this one, This is also one of the few lenses I don’t use any filters on. Some people say to use filters to protect the front element of the lens and on a lot of my other lens I do have filters either circular polarisers or skylight filers to remove the UV haze, but on the macro lens used now primarily for macro work I don’t have any filter and rely on the lens hood to protect the front element. It’s no longer the lens that’s permanently attached to my camera that’s the 70 – 200 these days so the lens is in the camera bag until I find mushrooms or something else to have a go at. As well as macro work the lens makes a get portrait lens and the f2.8 wide open gives a great effect, while on macro work the f32 stepped down size gives a great depth of field and still sharp images. I’ve taken a lot of images with this lens over 7600 shots and it’s probably my favourite lens though last week’s list showed more shots taken with the 70 to 200, but I’m putting that down to the use of burst mode on the wild life shots to boost the shot count on that one.  The lens is a great lens and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to get into macro or portrait work. One I’d certainly miss if I didn’t have this one in my bag.

Thanks for dropping by the weekends blog again will be how I got a shot and next weeks gear review from my bag will be the next lens I obtained and a great around walk around lens, the one I recommend if anyone asks me what one lens should I have.

Glenn.

This week I headed out to the Australian Botanical gardens, Mount Annan, only a little less organised than usual. The recent rains here in Sydney gave plenty of new opportunities for Mushroom shots and I managed to get a few bird shots as well., Today I’ll go through a mushroom shot again, starting with the first shot the scene and lighting conditions, form this shot you can see what the light is like and the little mushrooms all waiting to be captured. I usually select a few to take and set up and take a series of shots on each.

The next shot something I don’t normally do I moved the dial to P mode so you can see what the camera would take if it’s up to its own choosing, as you can see it tried to lighted the shot by opening up the aperture and hence lost the depth of field, you also see how washed out the shot looks. This shot is not flash even though the flash fired it wasn’t pointing at the scene so it’s all available light. The day was very overcast and after I get these shots it started to rain so that was the end of the day shooting.

The next image is again straight out of camera no editing, but this time with flash and full manual mode, This is where I found out how unprepared I was today First I realised I didn’t bring my remote trigger for releasing the shutter so I had to be careful each shot not to move the camera, I set it on 2 second timer. The camera was balanced on bark ships to get the framing right, none of today’s images have been cropped the framing is as per the set up.  I then set up my two flashed and when to take the first shot, its then my next problem came to me, one of the flashes had run out of juice so forgot to charge the batteries for it, so luckily I had one working and a have a small piece of aluminium foil in my camera bag I sometimes use as a reflector and today it got a good work out. SO like normal I step down the aperture to maximise my depth of field and bring up the shutter speed to sync speed, this gives the dark to black background and the only light on the mushroom is the side light from the 8” softbox and some reflected back from the aluminium foil. So I try several variations on the lighting angles, and flash power till I get the look I like one with some shadow and highlights and try and get lighting into the gills to bring them out.

The final shot is the one after the processing work in lightroom as explained in last week’s blog, this shot followed the same process, contrast, clarity, darkening the blacks and dropping the highlight a fraction. The final shot here is the one that I put out each week on google plus.

Hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes look again and it hasn’t spoilt the magic for anyone.

Thanks for dropping by.

Glenn

G'day welcome back to my blog, as usual the mid-week blog will be all about what gear I have and why, for the next few weeks I'll run though my lenses what I have and why. I'm going to start with the lens I use the most and sitting down to this I was surprised to find out it wasn't the lens I thought it was or would be. Light room collects a lot of data about each photo and has a really useful database of it all, for each shot it not only collects your camera settings but what lens you used and the focal length at the time as well, so sitting down here to write this today I thought I’d be righting about my macro lens but turns out not the case, and by quite a long way in fact. So it turns out my most shot with lens is my 70 to 200 f2,8 IS USM II coupled with the 1.4X extender.

Looking at the lightroom count I’ve taken 13665 shots with this lens with and without the extender, the macro lens is next but that comes in at 7648 shots so the long lens has taken way more shots. At first I was surprised but then thinking about it, not really, the long lens I use a lot for bird shots and these are often in burst mode, so the count soon adds up.

The lens is the heaviest I have so I certainly know about it carrying it around, but it certainly gives great results and the image stabilisation is something else hand holding down to lower shutter speeds of 1/30 of a second at times at full reach. Thou some of those shots aren’t always the best. I’ve used the lens for some close up mushroom shots and a lot of bird shots, I’ve found that my best results are still found with it mounted to the tripod with the tripod mounted at the lens collar not the camera body, the collar nicely balances it out so less stress on the camera lens mount. The 1.4 extender gives you the extra reach but you sacrifice the f2.8 to an f4 so loose some light, but I can still get some nice background blur with f4 and often find I need to step further down to get a complete bird in focus with depth of field being somewhat limited at f4. I’ve also used this set up of the 70 to 200 with extender for a photo shoot for a works soccer match with the office vs the factor match held annually, and from the side lines got great results and some close ups.

The down side is certainly the weight and I may be needing to replace a camera strap soon as it’s starting to show signs of wear where the strap joins the camera even though I usually hold the camera while walking there is still signs of wear there now and I don’t like the idea of camera and lens taking a tumble. The only other issue is the size of the len extender and lens hood they make for a decent length and if I need to change out the lens I have to take off the lens hood and then it’s a stretch to fit in the Lowepro slingshot bag I use. These are minor things but still something to consider, but I find the shots I get with this lens and extender are still making me very happy, At times I’d love a little longer reach and I’m waiting to see what the new Canon 100 to 400mm will be when it turns up, also its price, there are a few alternatives to longer lenses like the Sigma and Tamron 150 to 500mm which I’ll be having a look at before I decide which way to go when the time comes for a longer lens. But for now the 70 to 200 with 1.4 extender is doing a great job and I’m happy with the results, and it’s easy to see why It’s the lens in my bag that’s not in the bag so often.   

Thanks for dropping by, and I’ll be back on the weekend with more on how I came by a shot I took then, The paper daisies are in full flower now at the gardens this weekend by the sounds of it so could be the place to be.  

Glenn.