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I recently took the plunge and spent a very large chunk of change on this new lens. I’ve had it for about two weeks now, and, well, I’ll reserve judgement for a proper review.
But just so you know, it’ll be coming your way soon.
On July 18th, 2009 I’ll host the Fort Collins edition of Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk. We’ll be cruising around the Colorado State University campus. The walk starts at 4 PM and goes until we’re all wore out.
If you live in the area, please come join us! It will be lots of fun. For more, and to register for the walk, visit the photo walk’s web site:
Elizabeth at Eileen Donan Castle.
18mm focal length
My wife and I recently took a vacation, a really big splurge for the two of us. We’ve been married six years now, and we have not taken a “real” vacation since our honeymoon. So we decided to go big. It was kind of a last minute thing, as we have baby #2 coming later this year. So we went on a 15 day trip to Europe. Started in London for one day, went to Edinburgh, Scotland for three days, then to the highlands of Scotland (stayed at a B&B on Loch Ness) for four days, then back to London for three days, then Paris for four days. It was quite a trip, and I’ll never forget it.
But enough of that, let’s get this back to photography, and specifically portraiture. Knowing there would be lots of scenic views to capture, I bought a new wide lens, the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 to fit on my Canon 20D (yep, still using that old dinosaur, but my new 40D will arrive on Friday).
I gotta tell ya, that lens impressed me. In fact, I used it almost exclusively for the whole trip. You see, I brought a range of lenses: new Sigma 10-20mm, Sigma 28-80mm, Canon 50mm f/1.8, Canon 85mm f/1.8. I brought the primes so that I could do some nice portraits in Europe. But then disaster struck on day one; my all purpose walk around lens, the Sigma 28-80 broke. The aperture blades close down, but won’t open back up. So left with two primes and a super wide zoom, I naturally went for the zoom for flexibility. That lens got a workout, and it was a nice test drive for the next 14 days.
Eiffel Tower. 10mm
I mean really wide. At ten millimeters, standing at the base of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, I was able to get the whole thing with frame to spare. The wideness of this lens is great if you’re trying to catch a landscape or suck in an entire London hotel room bathroom (wow…small). Not so great for portraits though. Or is it?
Our London room at 11mm
So since my primary lens broke, and the wide lens was my only flexible option, it became my all around landscape/architecture/portrait lens. I quickly discovered one thing about using it at the wide focal lengths: it stretches things around the edges. This is fine for faraway landscapes, but death for a portrait. Let me give you some advice: don’t take a photo of your lady at 10mm, place her off-center, and expect to get away with it. You know how they say the camera adds ten pounds? Well, you’d have to put about 50 Canon 1D’s on your subject to equal the weight this baby puts on at 10mm.
Now, once you get the focal length above about 15mm, you can avoid some of the face stretching. You can put your subject closer to the edge of the frame. The first photo above shows my wife standing in front of Eileen Donan Castle out near the Isle of Skye in Scotland. I took this shot at 18mm, and was able to compose the shot how I wanted, without worrying about stretching. At 20mm, you’re pretty much in the clear except for the very edges.
In choosing which super wide lens to buy, I looked at three makers: Canon, Sigma, and Tamron. The Canon has the name recognition and reputation. The Sigma had the price advantage. The Tamron had the largest range of focal lengths. Ultimately, I chose the Sigma because of image quality and price. At the time I purchased the lens, it was more than $300 cheaper than the Canon version. My European test drive proved to me that the image quality is top notch, and I’m glad I saved the dough, since it will go toward replacing my broken lens.
Driving on the left! 10mm
This is a really great lens to have in your bag. I love the image quality (contrast, color, and sharpness) and the ability to go wide when I need to. If you’re a photography generalist, get a lens like this. If you’re a portrait photographer (as I am), then you’ll still find it very useful in your bag.
It’s no portrait lens by any means, but works well in a pinch if you keep the focal length to the longer half of the range, or if going wide, keep your subject dead center in the frame. You’ll find it’s pretty big (much larger than you’d expect for such a short focal length) and somewhat heavy (lots of elements).
While it has the smallest focal length range of the three (10-20 for the Sigma, 10-22 for the Canon, and 10-24 for the Tamron), the cost savings and image quality are significant factors that to me puts it at the top.
To see lots and lots of sample shots with this lens, check out my “Europe 2009″ Flickr set. As of the time of this post I have about the first five days of the trip processed and posted. More to come in the next few days.
Most of all, having a lens this wide is fun! I had a blast playing around with photographic opportunities that were only possible with a wide lens (such as the driving on the left photo above). And when I had too much room in the frame, then let’s face it, nine megapixels is plenty so I just cropped the photo.
I got a new toy recently. Shortly before Christmas, I purchased an AlienBees B400 monolight and 30×60 “giant” softbox. The main driver behind this purchase was A) I like Paul C. Buff gear, B) PCB stuff is very cost effective, and C) I wanted to get a really big softbox without doing something home made with my non-standard existing strobes.
The Test Drive
Here’s pretty much the first image I made with the new strobe and softbox. I had literally taken it out of the box ten minutes before. No other lights were used, and I took this in the middle of the living room. I was able to drop the ambient to black by placing my wife and son right next to the light. This shot showed me that I really love the soft light coming from that big softbox.
Getting Down and Dirty
We recently moved into a new house that needed renovation before it could be lived in (a beat up foreclosure). So the new toy went into storage and didn’t get played with again for several weeks. But this past weekend I got to a point where I could take some time for photos. The new house has a great big basement that we’ve decided to make a dedicated studio space. It just needed to be set up. So I took a little time to get things all squared away. Then I decided not to let that work go to waste, so I brought out the new toy again.
For this shot, I used classic butterfly lighting. I put the giant softbox up high pointing down. Then I used a reflector down below to lift any shadows. But I decided to try the gold side to warm up the light. Seeing the nice warm color, I decided to put a deep blue gelled flash on the background for some warm/cool pizazz. I like how it turned out.
Then it was my turn in front of the camera. This time I took away the reflector and just went with the straight softbox. Again, the blue gelled flash on the background, but this time lying on the floor pointing up.
A few observations while testing out the new strobe:
Conclusion
It’s awesome. I highly recommend this combination if you’re looking for a new studio strobe setup. I plan to buy a couple more.
This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.
Wow, it’s been a long time since I left off on this series. The last article from the series, Mid Key Lighting, was over a year ago! I’ll try to be better about writing more of these. So here we go, high key lighting.
So now you’ve learned about low key and mid key lighting. To recap, low key is where the photograph is dominated by darker tones. Mid key is dominated by medium tones. Can you guess what high key is? Yep, totally dominated by bright tones.
A high key image lends itself to a bright and cheery feel. It evokes happy emotions.
This is exactly why I chose to photograph my son in high key for his first birthday portrait. It’s an awesome, happy time, full of cheer and pride for tackling that difficult first year. The first year is full of challenges and triumphs, both for baby and parents. The first birthday also marks the beginning of the “sweet spot” (in my opinion). Year number two is awesome! Then comes year number three, when the terrible twos start, then the honeymoon is over! Ahem, ok back to the program.
Obviously, since high key is bright, you’ll need a bright background. White seamless paper is my choice here. You could use white cloth, but paper seems to work best. You could use a less than white background, and nuke it with lights, but I wouldn’t suggest it, especially if you’re just starting out with this style of lighting.
A few weeks ago, I took the photos of about 30 employees for a government contractor in Fort Collins, CO. These were to be simple head shots for the company’s use on the web and in an employee directory. Nothing special.
Here’s a diagram to show how the lighting was set up for the employee photos:
The camera was about 15 feet from the subject, set to 70mm with a shutter speed of 1/250th to kill the ambient light. Aperture was set to 6.3 to throw that background a little out of focus (helped by the longer focal length). This also let me choose a low power on the flashes to use less juice and recycle quickly.
The key light was a Canon 430EX set to 1/4 power, and shooting through a translucent umbrella. I feathered the light forward to soften it and direct a good portion of the light across the subject and onto the reflector.
The gold reflector bounced the light back into the shadow areas and warmed them up, giving the subjects a nice glow.
The background light was a Vivitar 285HV, set to 1/16th power and zoomed out all the way to give a tight light pattern. It was up about 8 feet off the ground, and placed about 6 inches from the wall. The light was pointing down at about 45 degrees. This made the light sort of “skip” or “scrape” down that wall, adding lots of shadow to the rugged stone. Had I pointed the light straight at the wall from a distance, it would have come out looking flat and lack interest and shadow.
This was a very quick throw together shot. I got to the hotel about ten minutes before the employees, picked the spot in about a minute, and threw everything up in a hurry. Two test shots to get the lighting nailed and I was off and running. Bang bang bang, 30 people in about ten minutes. Each person was literally less than 20 seconds. They sit down, a couple posing instructions, *click*, “Next”.
When I moved to Colorado on New Years Day of this year, I realized that a whole new world of photographs opened up to me. Every day I get to experience something new, something beautiful, something that just begs for a photograph. I started carrying my trusty old backup camera, my Canon D30, with me everywhere I go.
As I go through my day, I keep my camera handy and take pictures of things I find interesting. I’ve started a new blog called Photowalking Colorado where I can post these photos. This is a no frills blog where I can regularly post a photo and a quick and dirty description. That’s it, nothing more. If you like Thomas Hawk’s web site, you’ll recognize the format straight away.
It didn’t make sense to start publishing these photos here, as this blog is mainly dedicated to the art of people photography, and I don’t want to pollute your feed reader with something you don’t necessarily want.
If you’d like to subscribe to the feed for Photowalking Colorado, you can snag it here.
If you visit the blog, let me know what you think! I’m always curious what people think of my photos. Drop me a comment in this post or leave one on Photowalking Colorado.
Cheers!
Tim
It’s been a really long time since I highlighted some of the reader submissions to the Sublime Light Flickr Pool. I think some refreshing is in order.
But first, let me hand out a few updates about the blog. First off, long time readers have undoubtedly noticed a significant drop in the posts over the last six months. As you know I moved from Texas to Colorado during this time, and right about the time I was ready to pick things up again, we decided to start a new business. We’re opening up a retail store in our new home town. In addition to that, we’ll be opening up a studio location for our portrait photography business.
Needless to say, I’ve got my hands full.
Despite my neglect of this blog however, the traffic keeps picking up. More and more people find this blog every day, and of particular interest is the Portrait Lighting For Beginners series (which I will someday finish).
To date Sublime Light has around 600 feed subscribers and gets around 500 extra visitors a day that don’t subscribe. These visitors come from more than 110 countries! Some of these are a little surprising to me (I honestly don’t know why, but they are). For example, 30th on the list is Qatar. Or how about Vatican City. How cool is that?
You guys are coming from all over the world and are coming together based on your love of photography. Awesome!
Reader Photos
OK, enough of that. Let’s see some of my favorite photos submitted to the pool recently.
I’ll start off with Rex Lisman, the pool’s most prolific photo adder guy. Rex’s specialty seems to be senior portraits, something I haven’t dabbled in much but would like to.
I really like Rex’s style of putting these teens in a nice relaxed natural setting in Arkansas. There’s some really beautiful landscape there, and that certainly can’t hurt things. One thing I like about Rex’s work is that even with the strong settings, he still manages to get your attention on to the subject.
Next on to our next biggest contributor, Anthony HB2007. Warning, don’t click to his photostream if you’re at work. Whoops. IT guys, it was an accident, I swear.
Anthony’s photostream is full of beautiful models, which certainly can’t hurt your images. Some are fully clothed. Some are…well…shall we say less than fully clothed. But there’s one thing he does well, he puts the right light on the right model.
Take this image for example. Soldis, his Icelandic model has some of the most arresting eyes I’ve seen in a long time. Anthony put the light directly on her face to really accentuate those eyes. Beautiful!
TimpWeb created this next very unique image. There was clearly some post production going on here, but I really like the departure from typical portraiture. One commenter says it looks like a movie poster. I’d have to agree!
From time to time fabsenstylsen posts a unique photo to the pool. There’s something about this next one. I dig the lighting. I’d tell you more about fabsenstylsen, but I never took German.
There are lots more fantastic photos in the pool. I’d encourage you to check it out. I’d show you more, but I’m out of time. You’ll just have to go have a look for yourself. Better yet, join the 263 members and post some of your own!
UPDATE: Now how did I know that Anthony’s photostream would receive a bunch of traffic after this post went out?
I really love the Rocky Mountains in spring. All day long I listen to the sounds of hummingbirds whizzing around, sounding just like those flying cars from the Jetsons cartoons. The breeze kicks up and the smell of earth and pine needles fills my lungs with every breath. From my front deck I look down to the Cache la Poudre river below and watch the kayakers and rafters braving the rapids below. When I’m not careful and leave a bag of trash out, a neighborhood bear comes and flings it everywhere in the middle of the night. OK that part isn’t so cool, but how cool is it having bears around?
It’s really quite beautiful, and photogenic. It makes me want to grab my camera, take a hike, and take a photo. It also makes me want to play with high dynamic range (HDR) images more. The colors that are everywhere just beg to be shown off in photos! Simply taking a photo and bumping up the saturation won’t do.
I’ve been a subscriber to Trey Ratcliff’s Stuck in Customs photoblog for quite some time now. If you like HDR, you simply must check out his site. He’s been all over the world, so much so that he could possibly say he has no home. His site is full of HDR images of exotic far away places, and some of his hometown of Austin, Texas (where I moved here from five months ago). Knowing that he has a HDR tutorial, I read up on it and decided to make some images of my own.
Hewlett Gulch
This past weekend I took the family on a little late morning hike to Hewlett Gulch, just a few miles from our house. Not the most beautiful part of the Rockies, but enough to get my HDR juices flowing.
With a 30 pound toddler on my back saying “hi” and “bye bye” to every flower, rock, and blade of grass, I huffed and puffed my way up the canyon. With a potential killer photo around every bend, I couldn’t let a little out-of-shapedness stop me from moving forward. Boy I’m looking forward to the day when my son can hike on his own.
If you look through my Flickr stream, you’ll see all the HDR photos from the day. You may notice that I found myself naturally preferring to keep the HDR “surrealness” down to a modest level. With HDR you can really go over the top and make your images look quite, well, freaky. Cool, but freaky. There was only one photo that made me get my freak on (at left). We came upon his fireplace out in the middle of the woods. There were still ashes and everything. It was quite odd, and the scene had a strange feel to it. So I really punched up the HDR look.
If you haven’t tried HDR yet, I’d encourage you to give it a try. It’s a lot of fun, and you can get a free trial version of Photomatix. Just be careful, it’s a little addictive. I’ll be posting some more HDR photos as I take them.
And as I figure it out, I’ll post some results of my next experiment: HDR panoramic images.
The Pocket Wizard Pre-Trigger
Back in February, I promised to put up a review of the Pocket Wizard Pre-Trigger. I had just bought one and wanted to give it a test out.
Though I’ve been super busy and haven’t had a chance to use this thing much, the perfect opportunity presented itself recently. Spring has a good grip on northern Colorado. The flowers are blooming, the weather is warming up, grass is getting green, and the birds and insects are starting to come out in droves.
A few days ago we put up a few bird feeders with hopes that we could attract a few visitors. Boy did we ever! I tried to get some pictures of those birds, but they wouldn’t come around with me standing there. What ever would I do? Yep, this trigger came to mind instantly.
First off, I should mention that the trigger that came for my Canon 20D doesn’t look like the one pictured (from the PW web site). The little box is much smaller, with just a tiny switch with a “I” and a “O” symbol.
Bird brains shows up to drink
First up was the hummingbird feeder. I set up my tripod, mounted the camera with my Sigma 70-300mm lens, and positioned the whole setup about 5 feet from the feeder with the lens set out to 300mm. I got a focus on the feeder where the bird would be (this particular bird always goes for one side), and set the lens autofocus switch to manual.
Tripod mounted, lens set to 300mm
The trigger doesn’t come with much instruction to speak of. The most important thing to know about this trigger is that there are two switch positions: “I” and “O”. Think of one as holding down the shutter button half way. When you switch it on, the camera will get a focus lock (if set to AF), and wait for a trigger. The moment you press the shutter, there will be no lag. If you have the switch set the other way, when you trigger the remote, it will first attain a focus (if AF is turned on), then take the picture. This explains why I set the focus up then set the switch to manual focus. I turned the switch on the trigger to “half way” I’ll call it. This way, when I trigger the camera, there will be no lag whatsoever.
I went in the house and waited. I couldn’t see the camera, but I could see the feeder. With my other Pocket Wizard in hand, as soon as the bird showed up, I started pushing the button like crazy. I ended up walking away with a few decent pictures that would have been impossible without a wireless trigger.
If I were to do this again (which I will), I’d set up a flash to really accentuate the bird. I’ll post those when I get around to it.
Next up was our finch feeder. This thing is seeing some serious action. At times we have 8-10 birds all duking it out for some seed.
This time I decided to go a little wider. I set up the tripod about 15 feet away and had the same lens, but set to 70mm. Got my focus, composed the shot, and went inside. 20 seconds later the birds showed up and I snapped a few photos.
70mm
I then went back outside and recomposed the shot at 300mm. Went inside and got a few more.
300mm
Unfortunately it was evening and I couldn’t get the shutter speeds I wanted to really freeze the motion. But that’s okay, I’ll try again. Bumping up the ISO would have done the trick, but I was okay with a little motion blur over some noise.
One thing to note about this trigger. When the switch is set to “shutter half way” mode, you can rapid fire the shots. However, just like if you had your finger on the shutter, an image won’t show up on the LCD. You have to turn off that switch and the image will show up, even if it’s been a long time since your last image. Also, because cameras keep priority on the shutter when the button is halfway pressed, know that the images will not write to the card (or will write at a slower rate with a lower priority). So your camera’s buffer may fill up after a handful of images.
When I first got this trigger, I ran out to take some pictures of the sky. I thought that the ability to trigger the camera without touching it would be cool. I was a little frustrated at why the image wouldn’t show on the LCD until it occurred to me what was happening.
So, my overall impressions of this trigger are simply that it’s awesome. It has enabled me to get some photographs that I wouldn’t be able to get without it. This $80 trigger is a LOT cheaper than a $12,000 600mm lens. Sure, I can’t be at the camera, but at least I get the shot. I can also start taking photos of my family with me in it, and don’t have to break an ankle stumbling over rocks to beat the self timer. To me, that’s worth 80 bucks right there.
And don’t even get me started on the distance I can go from the camera thanks to the Pocket Wizard’s amazing range. I haven’t even tested that yet with my flashes.
Have you tried this trigger? What did you think? Drop a comment.
