Got my brand new Canon 50mm or as I have learned recently, the “Nifty Fifty.”

If you have read any reviews on this lens, you will have noticed how a lot say it’s really cheap but has outstanding optical quality? Well here to prove the latter, is my set of quick images I took today at work. The sharpness is breathtaking and the depth of field is fecking brilliant. I love having that ability to get out of focus stuff the way you want it.

This is a model from work and below is the full sized crop of it. LOOK AT THAT BLOOMIN DETAIL!

So I am so so chuffed with this lens. Aye it’s plasticky and aye it’s cheap, but the results speak for themselves. The best place in this lens is at f/5.6, where you get no CA’s and perfect detail. 

If you need an amazing lens for £60, get the Nifty Fifty sharpish…

I want to keep the Tamron. I guess I just didn’t feel comfortable using it, but after a little thinking, it’s better if I try to use it. It’s a great lens and has great optics. So anyway, it’s a keeper.

Tonight it was amazing out, with the stars in full show. So I whipped the Tamron out and tried some bulb shots. The initial ones were pretty crap, but then as I tried more and more time/apertures, it started to get really interesting.

The first was this one, which I did a lot of ACR tinkering with:

So I tried it at double time and f/8, which is basically raw image:

I can’t believe how much our planet is moving during 10 minutes! I think these images could have been so much better had they been taken outwith a town where there is quite a bit of light pollution. I am looking forward to heading out of town and getting some really nice, maybe even longer exposures.

For the first attempt at some star photos, I think they have come out ok.

OH and to top it all off, I saw a shooting star. Beautiful.

I deliberated for hours (and I mean that) over what one to get. I looked at the Manfrotto 680b and was ready to buy it. Then I asked myself, do I need such an expensive monopod? I’ve never used one, what if I don’t like it? Hmm.

I then saw one for £7.99 delivered. Again I spent a few moments weighing up the pros and cons. Nah, too cheap and like anything in this world, you get what you pay for.

Well ok then, what do I do now? I already have a mini-tripod made by Velbon. It’s fantastic quality and I’ve had it for 3 years now and it’s still working great. So I had a quick browse of the Velbon monopod range and loved all that I saw. And then I saw the UP-4000 on Bristol Cameras for £15. 

It took me all of 20 minutes to quickly read a few reviews and a lot of positives came back so I bought it.

£17.50 delivered from Bristol Cameras

When it arrived I was totally chuffed with it. This thing is ROCK SOLID and has a decent weight to it. It is aluminium I think but is light enough not to tax any muscles carrying it about. The snap grips on the extendable legs are super strong and to test this I leant on it with a lot of my weight behind it. It didn’t budge a bit.

The shaft, althought it looks round on all the photos you see of it, is actually quite square. This is a brilliant choice as it prevents any sort of twisting or movement at all. Again to test this I extended all the sections and then shook it as hard as I could and there was absolutely no rattle or shaking from the monopod. Some amazing build quality for the price.

Some photos

The soft grip allows excellent feel and stability

The foot at the right screws up to reveal a metal spike, and can screw all the way down to cover it. The foot is rubber and very grippy. You can also see the snap shutters here and they are heavy duty. Probably not the best for say wildlife photographs, but for a safe, sturdy platform for everything else, they are excellent.

Here it is fully extended. There is NO bending or sagging. This thing took a lot of my weight and didn’t buckle at all, so it’s perfect for bigger lenses.

The top of the pod has a screw that you screw in to your camera and it’s been brilliantly thought out as the very last bit of thread that you tighten it on to orientates the camera to the front of the monopod. This is a brilliant thing to have as I didn’t want my camera sitting squint on the pod. The top disc is a rubberised finish and once screwed on tightly, holds the camera rock steady.

So if you didn’t already get it, I love this monopod. For £17.50 it is an absolute steal and I can’t see me wanting to upgrade it anytime soon. Absolutely fantastic.

Today was a good day (as I said in the Tamron write-up) as I got some nice shots today.

After trying out the Tamron and deciding it wasn’t really my cup of tea, I packed it back up in it’s box, snapped on the 18-55mm again and started shooting. My cat Millie was the subject of this mornings efforts.

and at 100% size, it’s brilliantly sharp:

Blair (my brother) was playing with her with a bit of twig to get her to look at the camera, but it was pretty tough to get her in focus/sharp/in frame at all! She’s a fast wee thing.

Again @ 100%

That’s amazing! A lot of people seem to think the kit lens leaves wanting, but when you can get pictures as sharp as this, on a moving subject that’s small and hairy, it’s pretty damn good.

After taking 60 photos and getting a max of 20 useable, I turned my attention to things that weren’t going to rip my hand off. A basket.

@ 100%

Now I don’t know about you, but how much more detail do you need from a photo! I was astounded at the clarity of this hand held shot, when I wasn’t really focusing my mind on photographing anything. I just pointed the camera quickly at the basket and clicked. It just goes to show the potential that this combo of 450D and kit lens has.

I went to pick up Em from work at 5pm, and then we both headed out via Elcho Castle (near Bridge of Earn, Perthshire) to see if there was any good photo oppertunities. There was and I spent a good half hour annoying the hell out of Em, who ended up sitting in the car reading a magazine.

I will quickly post up these photos, with a wee comment if needed, as I’ve just noticed it’s 2:12am…amazing how time flies…

So there you have it. Saturday Shoot #1 is over. 

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I have ordered a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II prime lens. The reviews say it’s a cheaply built lens, but is mega sharp and mega good. So that’s all that matters to me!
Thanks for looking folks.

Over and out zzzzzz

Optical quality is amazing (see previous post) and is pretty simple to use. 

The lens hood provided makes the lens look smart as feck and allows you to shoot a with a bit of protection from flares. However as mentioned previously, it does require you to use a tripod for most things if you want a sharp image.

For £59.00 or £64.99 delivered (Mifsuds) it’s an amazing buy and should be a great start for me in to the long zoom photographs.

Today was a good day. I took delivery of a Tamron 55-200mm lens. I also did a lot of shooting, which you will see from the post after this one! Haha.

So, the Tamron 55-200mm you say? Yes. It seemed like the perfect addition to my photographic arsenal, considering my only other lens is the Canon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Kit lens. The Tamron would extend my camera range to 200mm. So what else made me buy it? Well the £64.99 delivered price was a big swinger, and so were the pretty good reviews about it.

I was really excited about this lens. I guess it was because it is my first lens purchase. Anyway, the lens itself is pretty good! I spent only a short while with the lens for reasons I will go in to in just a sec.

So let’s see some images already!

Ok. Well first up is a test of the focussing abilities. Unfortunately it’s not so good.

The focus was meant to be the pylon on the hill but the Auto Focus seems to get lost really easily. It searches back and forth until it sort of focuses, but the camera doesn’t beep. I remembered what some of the reviews said and switch up to f/8 and tried some more.
 

This is from a RAW file taken in to post production with a little contrast adjustment and sharpening. Here it is @ 100% size:

That’s more like it! It’s pretty sharp, but this took a few attempts to get the focus right. 

I guess if you have the time and can fiddle, you may find this lens to be a really good piece of kit. However even when I was trying to get stuff in focus, I thought, “This isn’t really what I like taking photos of.” I like to take wide shots, close up shots and generally try and get some composition going. With the Tamron, you NEED to use a tripod. My monopod just didn’t cut it. Because this lens doesn’t have image stabilisation, to get a sharp hand held shot is near impossible. Even with the tripod, the slightest movement caused blurring. I felt really limited with this lens. I like to move about and take shots on the fly and with this, it just can’t happen. You have to set down your camera on it’s tripod, set up the shot and then either use a remote shutter or timer to get the camera shake free. It’s all a bit of a faff. I bet you could get some seriously cool shots with this, but unfortunately I fancy something that’s less hard work. Something like the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II prime, that I have just ordered off Amazon.

Anyway, for the first photos that I took with the Tamron 55-200mm lens, they were pretty smart. But hopefully I will be able to return the lens and get something a bit more suited to what I want to achieve with my photographs.

On Monday night it was a cracking sunset, so I headed out on the bike and started the learning curve. The objective of this trip was to try AEB to capture some HDR images. AEB or Auto Exposure Bracketing is a function on my EOS camera that allows you to take 3 photos, one after the other, with different exposure ratings. So if you set the AEB to -2/+2 the camera takes 3 photos, one that’s normal exposure, one that’s -2 exposure and one that’s +2 exposure. The handy thing about this is once you have set it up, you can set the shoot mode to continuous and the camera will take 3 photos immediately after one another without you having to press the shutter down 3 times. When I took this photo, I didn’t have any remote shutter so I did have to manually press down the shutter and then take my hand off, but now I have bought the remote shutter, I dont even have to go near the camera to take an AEB set of pics. Brilliant.

HDR by the way is High Dynamic Range, so what you do is take 3 photos at 3 different exposures, then bring them in to a post-production package and merge them together. What you get is an image that would usually be quiet dark or light, but now has a bigger dynamic range so you can see in to shadows or highlights aren’t blown out etc etc. Like in the image here, if I had just taken one photo, the sunset would have probably made the golf ball and field in to a sillouette, but with HDR and AEB, you can see the field and the golf ball clearly.

Location: Kinross | Balado Bridge NATO Satellite Ground Station

For a first HDR it’s came out ok I think. There are a few things that I am not happy with but I think this is just the kit lens and it’s limitations.

I have had my camera for nearly a week now so I am starting to get to grips with a lot of bits and bobs, however last night I noticed some dust on the sensor (showing up as black dots in pictures.) It’s really irritating but I have now ordered a starter cleaner packfrom www.cameraclean.co.uk and that should hopefully clean up the sensor nicely.

I will post a review of the canon remote I purchased, as well as the cleaner kit, the Tamron lens I just bought and various other things tonight.

Thanks for looking and feel free to comment on the image.

Cheers

Gordon

So here it is. £13.50 delivered off Amazon.

Normal Operation. Push 1/2 to focus, fully to snap.

To use “Bulb” mode, push 1/2, then fully and THEN slide up to lock the shutter open.

A neat way to store it, with helping grooves and hole in the bottom for the jack.

The jack hole to keep it neat!

When plugged in it makes taking shake free photos easy. The shutter button works just like the camera shutter, where a 1/2 press focuses and a full one takes. The addition to that however is that in “Bulb” mode on the camera, you can push the shutter fully down, THEN slide it up. This locks the shutter open so you can basically take as long an exposure as you like!

A simple, cheap and fool proof way to take sharp images.

So yeah, pretty good day! I am slowly getting the hang of this and can’t wait to get down to a waterfall or the beach to get some cool water shots.

Thanks for looking, and please feel free to leave comments.

It may not be up to the standard of pro-photographer yet, but I like it! It’s a boring subject matter, but wait till you see how much detail is captured:

This is the image at 100% zoom. This plant has hairs! I can’t even see that with my eyes, from that distance! I LOVE THIS CAMERA!

I am going to update my gallery to include all the images I did with my Canon Digital Ixus 65, so you can see where I came from, and where I’m going.

Thanks for looking!