Equipment Advice (19)

When i first got my Canon didn't have that much cash for lenses picked up a Pentax K Mount adapter for about £15 on ebay with the confirmation chip.

Was at a car boot sale managed to pick up five lenses for £40.

Pentax SMC 50mm f1.4 Pentax SMC 50mm f1.7 Pentax SMC 35mm f2.8 Pentax SMC 28mm f2.8 Tokina 70-210mm f4-5.6

All in really good condition, no marks, scratchs or bugs, all working.

Manual focus lenses, with the confirmation chip will light up and bleep when in focus.

Work well with the camera, infact really like the colours the lenses produce because of the coatings, has a vintage feel out the camera.

Drawback is, its slow because its manual focus and need to use stop down metering unless shooting with wide open apatures.

I'm more into landscapes and places, so was never a problem for me, let me have some variety of lenses whilst i saved up.

Because photography is a mixture of art and science you must lean to accept that you cannot escape the fundamentals of physics and try to integrate them into you work in a natural way.

In simple English this means three things to most people:

The kit is 1/3 rd of the Image which means that 90% of the time low end kit will produce low end results. Don't buy cheap modern kit and inspect cheap old kit carefully (big bargains in older MF glass if you know what your doing). Number of elements, their composition and configuration is the single question that is never asked but controls more than 80% of the lens ouput.

Photography is light manipulation: learn about light and how it "works" then try to be artistic around it. a good example of a solid purchase here is a light meter or a gold foil reflector. bear in mind that natural results with lights require a lot more experience than you would think.

Photography has very few real rules and a great many good guidelines. guidelines can be bent or broken with skill and time where as rules can only be bent (never really broken) by the real pros (and normally by the influence of art - in other words its very open to personal taste).

passing bit of advice would be to take your camera and fix it into manual mode then forget that the other setting exist (you will learn better and faster).

have fun

"When life gives you lemons, say f*#k it and bail. Otherwise you'll be drinking frozen lemonade with SAR"
En France, le client a toujours tort

Edited 3 Aug 10, 12:54 PM by SeaofDreams

The 50mm f1.8 is made from cheap materials but the optics are great. Don't drop it though because it is relatively fragile. 50mm lenses in general are easier to make, have been made longer, and are made in larger quantities hence the low price.

With the smaller sensor on your camera it will act like an 80mm lens on a 35mm film SLR. This is very good for head and shoulders down to half length but you may be short of space for full length shots and that is where the wider lenses will be useful.

Of course your kit lens zooms out to 28mm (35mm film SLR equivalent) so you can use that for wider shots but that lens is better stopped down a little so you won't have a fast lens for low light. There are always ways round this though and multiple bounced flash can be an excellent cheap option if you buy secondhand and use optical triggers. Radio triggers are more versatile but optical are cheaper.

You can look up equipment specs on this site it is very useful http://www.dpreview.com/

Lens review http://www.dpreview.com/lensreviews/canon_50_1p8...

'Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather' - Velvet Underground

Edited 3 Aug 10, 1:39 PM by tanken

Studio_G wrote: Or perhaps you could just work with very short models?

Pigmey porn ? Or just put all models on their knees ?

I'm overwhelmed by the amount and quality of advice given, sorry if I haven't responded directly to all, rest assured it's all going in to be digested!

Hopefully will get the time to play soon and relate practice with the words you have all given.

Roll on the weekend!

Or to be absoultley safe from any inuendo a third alternative is to open a window (preferably your own) and shoot from the garden. If you live in a 1st floor apartment I would be happy to lend you a scaffold tower (above the 1st floor a 28mm lens is perhaps the lower cost option)

chris09_uk wrote: Been playing with the 50mm, and yes, wow, erm ... thank god i got the kit 18-55 to fall back on until the 28 comes my way ! 50mm looks perfect for facial and detail shots though (I do like close detail of body parts or the glimer in someone's eys ) Studio_G wrote: Or perhaps you could just work with very short models? Pigmey porn ? Or just put all models on their knees ?

This started out as a 'serious' technical thread, and now I'm getting images of models tied to scaffold !

It's all Studo G's fault .. honest !

Or it could be just that fetish photography is ridiculously funny.

Please form an orderly queue for scaffold hire

G

The 50mm on an affordable DSLR gives you a slightly further-back perspective which is generally regarded as flattering of faces, etc. This is unlike ultra-wide lenses that demand you move in close to fill the picture and end up with bulging noses, etc, as a result.

The f1.8 allows shallow depth of field to be used, and at a cost that is tolerable!

The golden/silver reflector is also a good idea, cheap-ish and redistributes your light to give softer shadow and/or highlights.

You seem to have a tripod sorted, so that allows long enough exposure for small apertures (and to keep your ISO setting low for less sensor noise). When using a tripod, I found with my Nikon it pays to disable the vibration reduction (image stabilisation) for good sharpness.

Most models will be still enough for exposures down to modest fractions of a second, of course depending on the pose and so on. If you want action shoots of flowing hair, limbs in mid flight, etc then you will need outdoor light levels or a proper studio flash setup, but that is not on your wish list it seems.

Bollocks spoken like an real expert.

Edited 30 Aug 10, 9:48 PM by pod333