Alex Wise Photography

Another shot of my lenses..

Read more…

Read more…

Sorry for the lack of updates just been a lit­tle busy piec­ing together a small guide for pho­tog­ra­phers vis­it­ing Tas­ma­nia. Any­way this was shot with the Canon MPE-65 the ded­i­cated macro lens which I once owned, a great lens but so fiddly.

Strick­land Avenue Falls, Tas­ma­nia cap­tured with a Canon 24–70 2.8 L.

A quick shot as I made my way through Sorell to Dodges Ferry for after­noon seascape pho­tographs. The light had been dull and difussed all after­noon from the cloud cov­er­age until a small empty pocket allowed the sun to light this rural setting.

Just some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent to water­scapes for once.

I’ve been dying to shoot lately but with other com­mit­ments I’ve been too busy to drive for hours for sun­sets or sun­rises. So over the last few days I’ve just been snap­ping around my lit­tle city of Hobart dur­ing the day with a Hoya R72 infrared fil­ter then con­vert­ing to black and white.

Ini­tially I was going to sub­mit these indi­vid­u­ally but feel they stand bet­ter in a group. As I men­tioned an infrared fil­ter was used and most shots were of vary­ing 3–7 minute expo­sures at F11-18.

A user at the Fred Miranda forum just noticed that the Canon China web­site has posted spec­i­fi­ca­tions for the Canon 50D. No doubt this will be taken off their web­site shortly so the user was kind enough to take a screen­shot of the sum­mary and full spec­i­fi­ca­tion page.

Due to the size of the full spec­i­fi­ca­tion page (1 meg) click here to open the image

Click here for the sum­mary page (150kb)

1.6x crop
15.1MP
Dust Reduc­tion
Auto Bright­ness Pro­cess­ing
95% viewfinder .97 mag­ni­fi­ca­tion
9 point af (All Cross Type)
AF Fine Tun­ing
ISO 100–12800
6.3 fps (high speed) 3fps (low speed)
Buffer: 16 RAW — 60 JPG — 10 RAW+JPG

Inter­est­ing stuff

It appears Canon has made changes to pric­ing of their lenses in Aus­tralia which is good news for us. I had a quick look on Qual­ity Cam­era Sales and it appears you can buy the Canon 100–400 L IS for $2050 whilst Bhpho­tovideo you are look­ing at $1419 (lens) + $63 (ship­ping) + cus­toms which prob­a­bly could make it around $1600–1700~. Although this remains mar­gin­ally cheaper for those who don’t mind get­ting their lens from over­seas, this price change will be great for oth­ers want­ing the piece of mind from buy­ing here whilst being able to walk out of the shop with the lens at a cheaper price.

There is still quite the dif­fer­ence which is a shame but hope­fully it’s a sign of more things to come.

Now where is the 5D mark II!

The Canon 18–55 is a lens which is included in a kit when pur­chas­ing a Canon body. I think the new kit has changed and the lens now includes image sta­bil­is­ing which is pretty rad. But any­way, I find alot of peo­ple say this lens is rub­bish, so much so they talk peo­ple out of even get­ting it with their pur­chase. For a lens which is only worth around $100 or less, it’s a great lit­tle lens. Depend­ing what your doing with it, I can under­stand its lim­i­ta­tions espe­cially in regards to por­trai­ture. For mem­ory it only goes to around F 3.5 which could be bet­ter for por­traits and ide­ally if your seri­ous I would get the Canon 50 1.8 and cou­ple that with the kit lens per­haps. But you can still get some ok shots for por­traits and it will do fine while learning.

The same can be said with it for land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy which does have sim­i­lar lim­i­ta­tions some­what. While the lens isn’t super wide, 18mm isn’t too bad but once you have a play with some­thing like a 10-12mm you will realise that 8mm makes alot of dif­fer­ence. I’m not going to pre­tend this is some super lens but really it’s per­fect for the ama­teur just look­ing to have a play and learn their cam­era in and out.

From what I learnt with this lens, pop it on a tri­pod for land­scape and dial it up to around F.16 and go nuts. Ignore what oth­ers say and use the time to decide which range you use more, if you find you’re shoot­ing around the 18–24 mark often then maybe a ultra wide angle like the Canon 10–22 or the cheaper Sigma alter­na­tive is a good option. Per­haps you shoot in the 30–55 range which I would prob­a­bly rec­om­mend a 24–70 or 24–105. I’m only rec­comend­ing the expen­sive Canon lenses because that’s all that I’m famil­iar with and I have noth­ing against the more cheaper options but just cant speak first hand.

Here are a cou­ple that I had taken in the past with this lit­tle lens