photography podcasts for on the road

Being a student who studies in another town than where his parents live I spend a lot of time in trains going to my parents again during the weekends. Some people are able to read stuff in trains, but I’m not. I just can’t concentrate, and I have to switch trains quite a bit before I’m in Leiden again.

Well I found a solution to kill the time in the trains, I listen to photography podcasts. (other podcasts as well, but since this is a photography blog photography is probably our common interest) They give me ideas to photograph, they teach me a lot and the time seems to pass by faster than when I’m listening music. But the best part I have not even mentioned yet, most of them are completely free. You can download them for free in iTunes!

Some of the podcasts I listen regularly are:

• Pro Photography show
• Photonetcast
• Tips From The Topfloor

From these podcasts I try to listen to every episode, they are very useful and even though the topic sometimes is not one of my primary interests they are very interesting. From other podcasts I download occasionally an episode, depending on the theme. You probably should look for your own favourite podcasts in the iTunes store because these are just my favourites. And I figured that since I like listening to these podcasts a lot during my time in the train I passed this on. 

vivitar 300mm f/5.6 (made by Tokina)

I posted a photo (sorry for the background etc. didn't had time to take a good one) of this lens here because there are different versions of this lens. First of all Vivitar isn’t a manufacturer it’s a reseller. It sells lenses made by others like Komine, Tokina and Kiron. You can identify the manufacturer by the serial number. Just look at the first two digits of your serial number and check it on this list 

The serial number on my lens is 37609225, meaning it’s made by Tokina. But Tokina has made two 300mm f/5.6 lenses, with different optical constructions and quality. Reviews of these lenses are scarce on the internet, and I found one of the version I have and one of the other version. One was enthusiastic about the lens, while the other about the other version wasn’t. I decided to buy the lens anyway because I could always resell it for around the same price, but I probably never will I really come to like this lens.

The lens feels good, it has a nice large part what you can use to focus, and the focus is a bit stiff. It is not as smooth as the Nikkor lenses. I suspect that there is oil in the lens to make everything glide over each other. The most important part of this is: it doesn’t really matter, you are still fast enough to focus on living things.

The lens has a lens hood and it’s relatively light. Unfortunately it is quite large, it will not fit in my lowepro slingshot 200 (mounted on my camera). It is just a bit too large, something to take into consideration before buying this lens.

Results: first of all I haven’t tested this lens at any aperture slower than f/8. It simply makes no sense to do that because you want a fast shutter speed. (at least if you use this lens for wildlife photography). At f/5.6 the lens seems sharp, while you may see some chromatic aberration.

Even zoomed out you’re able to see it. As far as you have a quality in chromatic aberration this lens has quite good quality. It is not a very dark purple cast, but kind of lighter pink. But of course chromatic aberration is a bad thing, so if you plan to shoot a lot of photographs with large contrasts against the sun you might want to pick another lens. At f/8 the aberration disappears for quite a bit but if you zoom in it is still noticeable. (meaning it’s easy to correct)

When you photograph with the sun on your side, or in your back you will not see it, maybe in contrasty areas when you zoom in on 100% but that is easy to correct. For example: I took this photograph with the sun in my side. 

Sharpness: the lens is sharp, even wide open. I never felt the urge to close this lens to get a better sharpness. I have been able to make quite some aggressive crops in less than perfect lighting conditions. That’s the reason I love this lens so much, it almost doesn’t matter at what aperture you’re at because it is sharp anyway. (of course the DoF will differ but that’s another story).

Bokeh: first of all, this lens will not produce a lot of bokeh when you’re shooting wildlife. With a maximum aperture of f/5.6 you will not be able to get creamy portrait-like bokeh. But when you’re pretty close to your subject and you open up to f/5.6 you will discover a non distracting bokeh. 

It is nice and creamy but nothing special, however you have to watch out, as I already said you will get quite a large DoF even though it’s a telephoto lens due to the small aperture. This can create a distracting bokeh. 

Conclusion: it is a wonderful lens, but you have to pay attention since there are several versions with different quality. It will give you access to the telephoto range and I have took many wildlife photographs with it that I really like. But sometimes you’re not able to isolate the subject due to the small maximum aperture. If you want a larger aperture you also have to pay more and carry more glass. All I can tell you that I really like this lens, it’s sharp and it handles very well.

Some other notes:

• It’s minimum focus distance is pretty far away: a little less than 6 meters. I have never been that close to a wild animal but when you plan to use this lens to photograph your pets, you might want to pick another lens since you will be taking those photographs from the other side of the garden.
• Check the diaphragm, my experiences with the diaphragms of Vivitar aren’t as good as with any other brand. Check if the blades are oily or if they don’t close as fast as they should due to old springs.
• Mine came with an annoying lens cap, I have to screw the cap on the lens using the filter thread. Luckily I had a spare normal lens cap.
• The lens doesn't come with tripod-collar. I made a DIY collar because you will need a tripod to stabilize the lens. 

be confident

I had to photograph a couple of friends to give the photo to someone who will be off to India for quite a while. Because it was quite a hassle to get everyone together at the same day. Therefore I decided to go for the safe route, I took my 18-55 kitlens because that is the only one which has autofocus on my camera. It was going to be in broad daylight anyway, so I didn't need a fast lens or whatsoever. But being at the shot this turned out to be a major mistake.

You see I am very used to shoot with manual focus lenses, I just had to learn to deal with the likes of my camera again. I focused, recomposed and the shutter wouldn’t release because the part where the focus point was now pointing at was out of focus.

I had to take care of all these little things and I felt like I was using someone else’s camera.

The only thing that saved my was that I brought my 50mm with me because there was some forest in the area. Losing autofocus and losing metering felt as a relief. Just because I am used to shoot this way. Not that I promote to go cold turkey and shoot only with your MF lenses, the thing I’m trying to say is shoot important shoots the way you would shoot an unimportant personal project. Select the tools you are used to. If you just have bought a new flash, good luck with that, but learn to use it before you use it in anything important. If you just bought a new lens, happy you, take your other lenses with you on the shoot. You probably will need them.

And take some responsibility if you know you can do it, do it. The only reason I didn’t went for my 50mm in the first place was because I didn’t want to mess up the shoot because of my liking for MF lenses. But it turned out that because I like these lenses so much I am used to them and they enable me to get in my regular workflow, providing better results.

Well that was my rant for today, have a nice weekend. 

my christmas card

This is the photograph i picked as my christmas card. Actually there's a funny story behind it, I was thinking about setting up my tripod and place myself in the scene, walking away or something like that. But then this couple showed up. I had my camera already mounted on my tripod and because I already had a not so great experience with photographing someone in that forest that day I decided to put my camera on self timer. After I composed the shot, I pressed the shutter and acted like I was waiting for the couple to clear the scene. When the shutter released after 20 seconds this photograph came out of it. I was very lucky that they weren't in a weird pose or something like that because after a another 20 seconds they were way too close. 

After some more walking around in the forest I loaded this photo on my laptop. Unfortunately the colour temperature was way off. It was way too blue and my white balance was already on shadow. Even at the warmest temperature it looked too blue. 
I loaded this photo in Gimp, and converted it to black and white. Then I duplicated the layer several times and applied different brown colourizations to them. I shuffled and fiddled a bit with the opacity and the blending modes. When the colours were to my liking I made all these coloured layer one layer and applied a layer mask. I masked out all the snow because I didn’t want yellow snow. So that was about it for today, thank you for reading!

using manual focus lenses on a nikon camera

This probably should have been the first post on my blog, but I felt like there should be more information about other things than just manual focus stuff. Of course this blog is geared towards shooting with manual focus lenses, but I do not intend to only talk about this, but about photography as a whole.

Anyway, let’s start explaining why you would even want to photograph with manual focus lenses. Well first of all they are cheap, I have not spend over 25 euro’s for a lens. People tend to get used to their autofocus and will sell their old photography stuff for cheap. Even though the lenses may be of good quality. For example the 50mm f/2, a stunningly sharp and good lens and I picked it up for only 15 euro’s. 

You get access to a quality of glass you would never have been able to buy without being it an MF lens. Even the nikkor 35mm f/1.8 (which is intended for amateurs and is as far as I know one of the cheapest Nikon autofocus lenses) costs over 100 euro’s. As a student I certainly do not have a lot of money to spend and when I was looking for alternatives I learned about the compatibility of Nikon with it’s older lenses.

Almost every nikkor lens ever made (except for the invasive fisheyes) will fit on a Nikon camera. Although you need to know that cameras with a autofocusmotor drive in it (d70,d50,d90,d7000 etc.) will get damaged if you mount a pre-ai lens. But if you have a Nikon d40(x), d60, d3000 or a d5000 you can mount virtually every lens except for these old fisheyes.

If you have something less professional than the Nikon d300 or above you will not have metering with the MF lenses. And here is where the fun starts. Have you ever did give the metering system of your camera really the attention it deserves? I certainly did not before I switched over to MF. I always took for granted that the camera knew in almost every situation how to expose the scene properly. And now you’re on your own. I can’t deny it, it’s a steep learning curve. You will miss photographs and you will hate yourself for buying that lens. But that’s just in the beginning. After a while of guessing the exposure you will get the hang of it. So here are a few tips to begin with:

Don’t follow the sunny f/16 rule. I have felt that it underexposes the image if you use ISO 100, 1/100^th of a second and f/16 during a sunny day. I tent to use something like f/11. But this really depends on the time of the year, time of the day, where you are in the world, and the amount of light that’s reflected in the atmosphere. After some practice just follow your instinct, from time to time I just get the idea let’s put the exposure this way without even be able to justify that guess and it works. I’m not a MF-god or something like that, but after a while you just get the hang of it

Only fiddle with one variable in the beginning. Guessing the exposure is hard enough, don’t make it any harder. Set the aperture to such a value that you will get sufficient depth of field, put your ISO as low or as high as you want, and only fiddle with the shutter speed. During the day you will mostly find yourself shooting above 1/80^th of a second, so there will not be major changes due to a longer/shorter shutter speed since it’s already pretty fast

Use the histogram. The display can fool you bigtime, and when you use your meter you can trust it most of the times. But now you have to do the exposure yourself, and the screen gives you a different impression when the sun shines than when you’re inside or when it’s dark.

Shoot RAW, with RAW you will be able to change more than with JPEG, you won’t have to worry about white balance, and most important you will be able to change the exposure a bit without loosing too much quality.

The reward, this certainly is the best part of it. It feels so rewarding to do everything yourself. And you learn so much more about photography. I knew how the exposure triangle etc. worked before I started using MF lenses, but now I am more conscious of them. And I think that's a good thing, you can let your camera do all the work but if you don't know why the camera is behaving the way it does you'll be less able to anticipate on any mistakes. So if you're a Nikon shooter,(or any other brand which allows you to mount old lenses)  look through ebay, buy a cheap prime and try it yourself. If you don't like it at all, you probably can sell the lens for around the same amount again on ebay.

zone focussing

Zone focussing is a type of manual focus, to be able to do this you will need to use a manual focus lens, or turn of your camera’s autofocus.

What you basically do is that you rely on your depth of field, therefore it is very useful if your lens has depth of field markings on it. When you know the area which will be in focus you start walking. This makes you the autofocus, and you don’t focus on one thing but on everything which will be in your plane of focus in front of you where you happen to walk across.

This may sound weird and confusing but it is very easy to get used to. Let me give you an example, let’s say you want to do street photography and you use a 28mm. You are new to manual focus and therefore you want a large depth of field and you use f/8.

Your depth of field markings on your lens say that from infinity until 4.5 meter will be in focus. Well 4.5 meter is a bit far away, so you focus a bit closer. Let’s say you focus on 2 meters. Your depth of field will be between 1.6 and 4 meters away from you. With this in mind you start walking through the city, and you do not change your focus. If you see something interesting you walk to it, until the subject you want to photograph is between 1.6 and 4 meters away from you.

When is this useful:

As in the example already said it is a good technique for streetphotography. Manual focussing requires that you look through the viewfinder. This will get you noticed by your subject. If you only have to compose your shot you will be a lot faster and you won’t get noticed as much as when you try to focus precisely on your subject.

For example this shot:

I actually was planning to take a photograph of the scene itself. I was mounting my camera on my tripod when this elderly pair walked into the scene. I had my aperture at f/11 while I was hyperfocussing. I only had to wait until they were 2 meters away from me to take the photo. (that’s why the horizon is off, I hadn’t had the time to set my tripod properly, but I started to like the angle while processing so I didn’t correct it)

You can do the same for sport photography. Especially when you are familiar with the game. When I shoot a basketball game, well obviously the most spectacular moments are during rebounds, lay-ups and dunks. This is all near the basket. The basket is the begin of your depth of field, because anything closer than the basket probably isn’t interesting, while the approaching players are. They will be in focus as well.

To be able to use this technique effectively during sports photography you will need a fairly wide lens. Say from 24 to 70mm because you want to have a larger depth of field. If you start using a 300mm f/2.8 your depth of field will be 0.12 meters wide if you focus on a basket which is 10 meters away. 

review nikkor 50mm f/2

Before my first review of a lens, I will explain what I try to do here. I'm not interested in what is the sharpest lens, if it is sharp enough it's sharp enough. I only use it in real situations and will not compare the sharpness at different apertures using a tripod to shoot the same subject over and over again. I just explain my experiences with a couple of lenses.

The 50mm, a lens every photographer should have in their bag. Well at least in the film days, (and maybe the future full frame days) because with the DX format a 50 will become a 75mm.

This length is a bit awkward if you are not used to it. It is a slight telelens, but it doesn't come really close as well.  So you probably won't be using this lens indoors, but i find it a very useful focal length for portraits. You can get fairly close to the model, get some interaction. It also suits my style of street photography, I'm not really a street photographer but i always felt that the action was like 4 meters in front of me and a 35mm (50 on DX) just didn't come close enough. But I also use it for everyday shooting, to shoot my brother's basketball games, concerts.

But now the lens, I own the nikkor-h 50mm f/2 pre ai lens. I bought it for 15 euro's from a guy who thought it was broken because it didn't focus on his camera. I saw no use in telling him that it would have been weird if it did, so I just told him I was trying a bit of DIY repair for a schoolproject. It looks like it's been through a war, but the glass is still good and has no scratches. I don't show a photo of the lens because it does not really matter what the lens looks like, there are different versions: 2 pre-ai's, ai and ai-s but they are all the same. As long as it is a manual focus nikkor 50 we're talking about the same lens.

The lens has 6 aperture blades which aren't round, if you close it down you will get a hexagon shaped bokeh.

Personally it does not really bother me, nowadays the aperture will be round at every aperture, creating a smoother bokeh. But it does not really distract, because if you have round bokeh or hexagon bokeh, the highlights will be shown as little almost round shapes. It only distracts because we aren't used to other shapes than roundish bokeh.

The lens has an aperture range from f/2 to f/16, at f/2 it is already pretty sharp and it peaks from f/5.6 to f/11. At these apertures this lens is extremely sharp, every imperfection on a model's skin would definitely show up. That's why I always use it wide open for portraits, because than it all comes together. When I take a head shot, only the eyes will be really sharp, hiding the imperfections on the model's skin, and if i do a full body shot they will not show up because they are too small.

For everyday situations I tend to use it at f/5.6, just because I like the depth of field it gives me, my subject will be sharp while the background will be unsharp. Especially if i shoot landscapes with it, I prefer rising the ISO than having a too short depth of field.
Landscapes? Yes! landscapes, i like longer focal lengths, I feel uncomfortable when i shoot anything wider than a 24mm at DX. I like to focus on details and like a smaller depth of field than the distortion of ultra wide angles. So i shoot landscapes with my 50mm from time to time.

Like this one, I took this photograph in Utrecht. I forgot the exact aperture but I think think it was taken at f/11 to get a maximum depth of field. What really amazed me when i was processing this photograph was how far you could enlarge it, it is impossible to see it from here, but the bridge has it's name written in the middle. I was wondering what the bridge was called and at 200% i could read it!

For sports:
It is a bit hard to find a good solution between getting close enough and getting a large enough depth of field. Because it is very hard to track focus someone who is playing a game. I rather use zone-focussing, but than you will need quite a large depth of field, a depth of field a longer lense only gives you when you close it down. I find the 50mm just at the edge of being convenient, my hit-miss ratio is a bit too high, but when i pull of a shot it looks great. The player is well isolated and you can clearly see the expression in his face.

Conclusion:
Get this lens, it is a cheap one and a good one. Manufacturers have been making 50mm's for ages and know how to make a good one for a small price. It does not really matter if you buy the f/2 or the f/1.8 version, although the f/1.8 is more common I also noticed that the price is like 10 to 20 euro's higher. This is weird because you only can tell the difference between these apertures by looking at the specs. The difference is 1/3th of a stop, I would not spend 10 euro's extra for this, especially since i bought this lens for 15. Just get the cheapest one and enjoy this lens.