The perfect lens for star-scapes
This article tracks an email conversation between me and Chip Porter of www.chipporteralaska.com CHIP: 16-35 canon lens Hi Tony Quick question. I’ve noticed in a couple of your wide angle night shots the stars distort on the outer edges. I have the same problem with my Canon 16-35L and have wondered if getting the 16-35L II would fix the problem. Have you used both lenses and if so did the newer lens fix the problem. I ask because we both are long time Canon shooters and you may have made this upgrade ahead of me. I too am fascinated with night photography and have been for years but...
Read MoreCold climates
When you are taking your camera into cold conditions, it will be wise to follow a few simple precautions to protect you and your gear. Feet One of the most important thing to protect! They are, after all, what is going to get you out of potential danger. You need to think about protecting them first and foremost. Cold climates can present several different dangers to feet. The first is cold. It is important to keep your feet warm and dry as possible. It is worth investing in strong hiking boots which have good waterproof qualities. If you can, finger a bit of waterproof wax around all the...
Read MoreNight Photography 2 – overcoming the darkness
So you have the night photography bug. You sit twiddling your thumbs in the daylight hours waiting for the light to fade so that you can go out and leave your camera perfectly still with its shutter open for many tens of minutes. You are not...
Read MoreExposing to the right
Exposure is a critical element in photography. Until recently it was common practice for landscape photographers to slightly underexpose image to increase highlight detail and increase saturation. But there is a new school of thought which suggests over exposing just short of blowing out the highlights will actually give you a better range of colours. Film In the days of film, I used to consistently under-expose by half a stop because the slide would retain more colours and so the resulting image would have a richer saturation. Digital With digital images, it was commonly practiced to boost...
Read MorePhotography techniques – Hyperfocal distance
Hyperfocal distance is the art in photography of achieving as much sharpness as possible throughout the image. In other words, it involves careful focusing adjustments to ensure that objects close to the camera and objects in the distance all have the same sharp focus, but more accurately, the hyperfocal distance is that point of focus where things are in focus from a point half way between you and the focal point all the way onward to infinity. Hyper-focal distance is more of a landscape photographer’s concept. When shooting landscapes, I never use auto-focus. Although the Hyperfocal...
Read MorePhotography techniques – focus stacking
This articles looks at a lengthy and complicated procedure to render every part of a scene with perfect focus. the aim is to achieve a high depth of field (DOF) whilst maintaining the high quality of your lens’ sweet-spot. The main challenge is, maybe, deciding what situations exactly would require this sort of treatment. This technique is popular for macro work, where the DOF is usually too shallow to capture all the sharp detail in a subject. Landscape could benefit as there is a requirement for sharpness throughout the scene. Usually an f/16 and careful hyper-focal calculations will...
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