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nesgran
ParticipantGet yourself an old manual lens and go out and play with it. Bring it to photograph your friends when you are meeting up. Once you come back you realise that technical perfection isn’t the most important thing nor is perfect framing or exposure either but rather what you capture.
ParticipantWhat I forgot to add to my reply that the reason I chose the sigma lens was that the lens in question was bought used from a real shop for £40 more than the 55-250 is being sold for new. The camera used is a 40D so the same that you are using. The equipment doesn’t make the photo but if you don’t have the right kind of gear you will simply not be able to achieve a lot of things. If I’m out I want to be able to completely melt away a distracting background, just look at the difference in overall look in my comparisons a few posts up. Even at the same aperture there is a vast difference in the quality of the bokeh simply because the sigma is a much better lens. So what if the ears aren’t tack sharp and you can work around the loss of sharpness in the far eye, in fact it doesn’t matter that much as the viewer will be drawn to the closer eye. There is a reason many pros that use canon shoot with the 85mm f1.2 wide open. Blurring the background is more important that keeping the entire head in focus. Of course, if you are in a studio with a backdrop there is no reason not to use f8 or smaller but outdoors there is.
BEG, yours is actually the fourth version which is better than my first gen, especially at f2.8. I should really get round to selling it off
Warren, what will you do when you smack your camera and the plastic mount breaks off? What will you do when it starts drizzling? What about if you want to use a circular polarizer? What will you do when the lego motor that powers the AF breaks down? These are some of the reasons why people who charge should be using pro level gear. It doesn’t have to be very expensive, a canon 24-105L isn’t that expensive you if you get it used, same with a 70-200 f4L IS. The 17-40 f4L is one of the cheapest L lenses available. What would give you more bang for your buck though would be a full frame camera, even if it was a 5D classic. I’m honestly getting the impression you have never handled pro level gear.
Don’t think that I’m bashing your pictures, I’m not, in fact I like most of them. What I am saying is that your equipment side of things is completely skewed. Just look at how you respond to the comments in your ETTR article as well as your responses here.
ParticipantLeft comparison is a less than amazing sigma 70-200 @f2.8 in first and @f5.6 in the second. On the right is a 55-250 @f5.6 in both. All at 70mm. Sigmas are known to render colours a bit warmer than canons but that would just be down to sorting the balance out in post from a grey card which I didn’t do here but I set the colour temp and colour balance to the same for comparisons sake. All three shots are straight out of camera apart from a small (1/4 stop) increase in exposure on the canon as it isn’t as transmissive at the same aperture. There is also a softbox on the right with a speedlight in it.
ParticipantBut with a big aperture there is no need to keep the shutter at 1/15, that is what I’m trying to say. You are fooling yourself if you think the colour rendition, contrast and sharpness will be as nice with the kit lens as one of the best L lenses available if you did a bit of PP on both of them. That said, the kit lenses are good for what they cost but they can’t compete with the versatility of the better lenses available. What you are finding is that the long focal lengths are thinning your DOF, why not just step closer with a shorter focal length if you are finding that the far eye is out of focus? What you gain with the bigger aperture is versatility, if you want you can stop it down but you can also chose not to depending on the shot.
The 200mm f2 is a beautiful lens but it costs about $6k new and is too long (imo) on a crop body for portraits. With the longer focal lengths you get the appearance that the ears are too close to the face as you get the compression setting in.
ParticipantMaybe I’ve got a bad copy of the 55-250 but mine is so soft on the long end that I can see it even in the viewfinder and needs stopping down to about f8 before it gets acceptably sharp. Also my point was that the kit lens isn’t hot, especially if you use it as a fixed f5.6 compared to a fixed 2.8. At 2.8 you will let in four times the amount of light meaning you can use a quarter of the shutterspeed which is not to be sniffed at. It doesn’t help with IS if you have to go to 1/20s shutter speeds since your subject will have moved during the exposure. I would much rather take a tamron 17-50 than the two canon kit lenses together because if you have the option of 2.8 on the long end you can always stop down for more sharpness and contrast, neither of which are amazing on the kit lenses wide open. At f8 they are fine but wide open not so much. Then with the large aperture primes you have another two stops. I think you should probably point this out in the article as you’ve entirely left out the effect of having the ability to close down the aperture for better sharpness or leaving it wide open for better shutter speeds. The larger aperture will also make your flash photography easier since you can dial down the power on the flash and thus getting shorter recycle times. Fair enough on the ability to change the perspective but I’m not a fan of portraits at over 200mm since the perspective starts to get a bit funny.
Alexandra, for a sec I thought they had hired on that Cain guy
Participanthttp://warrenjrphotography.com/
Check this guy out! He love to write articles with bias and no factual information. Not to mention he can’t focus properly .
He has the balls to charge people for photography lessons!!!
I don’t think he is bad, his shots look well executed and well lit and as far as I can see the only blurry shot is the one he used to advertise his workshop. And let’s face it, $25 isn’t a whole lot for a workshop
His equipment thoughts are very weird though, I can’t for my life fathom why anyone who mainly does portraits would sell his 85mm 1.8 lens to get the canon 55-250. To me it would have made sense to buy a 50mm 1.4 if anything as the 85mm is a bit unwieldy on a crop. I don’t know why he is recommending the older yongnou flash either since the new model has a built in radio receiver rather than having to faff with an extra transceiver. I don’t understand his hard on for the kit lenses and I’m not sure he understands aperture and how it affects sharpness and shutter speed either
ParticipantWhat I really hate is bad business practices:
I just saw this: “To wrap up the year. We are letting our customers name there price! If you have a cooperate event, wedding, anniversary party or family reunion and need a photographer, we will let you name your price and we will give you a package with prints, and a disk of images, with possibly a photo-book. Make if you call us to schedule a sitting. you will receive 10 free 4×6 prints with your event. ”
I’m not sure it is bad business practice, in fact I believe with a photographer at that level it is very good practice as no one can be disappointed. I don’t think they should be shooting weddings though as they aren’t good enough to pull it off. It might have looked a lot better if they had someone editing who knew what they were doing rather than slapping on 50% extra saturation. I would put this on the upper end of fauxs personally. No question it is a faux but it looks a lot better than some disasters out there. I even think this one has a proper flash, unfortunately they don’t know that you need to get it on a bracket if you are going to use it in portrait position. A lot of the photos probably started out life looking quite good out of the camera before being molested in photoshop.
On a side note. I just found the perfect faux editing program because it ticks all the boxes, it has photoshop in the name, there is autocorrect, there is an example on the front showing selective colouring, there’s no boring sliders or numbers, you just click on whatever level of oversaturation you want etc. Perfect, oh, it is also free http://www.photoshop.com/tools/expresseditor?wf=editor
ParticipantWhy shoot manual? I just don’t see the point when a camera has a very sophisticated light meter. If you want to control aperture there is aperture priority just like there is shutter priority if you need to maintain a minimum shutterspeed. It is a bit like manual focus, while it certainly works the majority of the time your camera will do a better job of it than you can.
My tip would be that if you have an emotional attachment to a photo for whatever reason you won’t be the best person to judge if it is a great shot.
ParticipantI came across this one, now this is also a great photoshop job
Then lets go to the beach
And Japan
before finally making it back to that photoshoped sofa (half naked girl)
I honestly don’t understand this guy, he has quite a few nice studio shots, the props might not be to my taste but they are well done and then he has all these truly awful shop jobs, nasty outdoor shots and a lot of what looks like random snapshots from around the house.
And let’s just finish off with a pixie for good measure
ParticipantCrime against humanity says it all.
Got a friend request from this great artist: http://www.modelmayhem.com/portfolio/2588053/viewall . On his site http://donsphotoworld.com/ you can also purchase all of these great pieces of art!
bloody hell, that was bad. I loved looking through the shots and then a couple of thoughts popped into my head. 1. Do models shit in the woods and 2. Does the man not own a sofa which he could use rather than photoshop the “model” in.
ParticipantWhy have I never thought of doing wedding shots like this…
You aren’t a Japanese upskirt perv? You are right though, that faux was pretty bad
Participantout of all those only these two worked but then I realised I could just browse through the albums
My thoughts on those two would be that they are both a nice but lacks a bit of wow those are great. Other shots in the albums I think are better. Both look decently sharp, good use of the depth of field but I would probably have turned the sitting girl around (unless she’d be squinting into the sun). Was the pretty warm colour balance intentional. I’m not sure what the 2014 represents but she probably knows. Did you try a few different angles on both of those? I would have been interested to see what the composition would have been if you took a step to the right on the guy by the fence and a step or two to the left on the other.
Looking through the rest of the shots I notice that the colour temperature is warmer on some shots and colder on others which makes it look a little odd. The third photo in the album with the guy is quite out of focus and in the last he is quite dark against the bright sky which isn’t great. Guessing from the catch lights in the second I’m guessing you were using a flash so you should probably have given the other shot a little fill.
In the album with the sitting girl I really liked the first shot of the horses on the field, shame the rear horse had its tail chopped off. I also really like the black and white shot of her with the glove, it just works really well though having her eyes a little sharper would have been nice. In general though, get rid of any blurry shots (there’s a couple in the album) and avoid chopping peoples’ feet off (when she is sitting on the bench) and the average will improve quite a bit
Keep working with the local photographer though and you’ll have a great future I think
ParticipantYou’re probably right that I noticed her because I pay more attention to people with better cameras, even though this one was a Nikon 🙂 . Also probably because she was using a flash outdoors which was pointed upwards without a bounce card. I’m not entirely sure if it was just me that noticed but it just looked a bit out of place as she was stalking the aisles of the cathedral.
In contrast when a friend of mine got married last year the photographer there was wearing a shirt and tie making most people assume he was a guest with a better than average camera until the ceremony started proper and he got a photography vest and a second body out of his trunk. I wonder how many nice candids he managed to take before then (I’ve only seen some of the pics up on facebook and all of those were the kind of wedding photographer I’d happily hire)
ParticipantI googled the “New York Photography Institute” and came up with the New York Institute of Photography, an online correspondence course. Anyone really surprised?
Not really 🙂
ParticipantI wonder if he accidentally uploaded the wrong shot but the after looking through the rest of his shots I’m guessing the 90% they reject shoot with cameraphones
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