Engagement Photos: Carrie and RobertPosted by drfl on June 23rd, 2011

While I’m not primarily a portrait kind of guy, I do, on occasion, take photos of  friends and relatives and children (of friends and relatives).  Today, I’m happy to present some photographs from my engagement photo shoot of Carrie and Robert.  I’d like to thank my sister-in-law, Kayla, for her assistance with working with the happy couple.  Below are some of the results from the shoot!  Congrats, guys!

Beyond Nature – People Portraits and a Forgetful Memory CardPosted by drfl on August 9th, 2010

Ever since I purchased my 135 f/2, I just can’t get over how great this lens is.  For quality, it is by far the best lens I own.   Period.  It’s just too bad it’s extremely limited in focal length.  Achieving focus through this lens is truly magical.  I have been able to focus in situations and conditions that I never was able to do previously.  Capturing young children can be a difficult task.  Besides being moving targets, they are almost completely unpredictable.  Trying to get them to pose is like asking a tornado to stop, it’s just not going to happen.  Anyway, while I always try to capture the poses, my favorite images of kids are those where they are playing and where they do not care that I am even there. 

Last Friday, my sister-in-law, Kayla and my nephew, little Tommy went out for a park photo-shoot.  We tried for the poses, but ultimately we just let him run around.  Being the kid paparazzi that I am, I managed quite a few shots.  Shortly after, I went home and began my download of the images.  I slid the card into the reader, browsed to the directory and realized that there were several folders of gibberish.  I was able to get about 20% of my images directly off the card, but the rest had been corrupted!  I’ve heard of such things happening, but in my 5 years of digital photography, I’ve never seen it.  (I routinely rotate old cards out so that I hopefully wouldn’t).  The card had only been used a handful of times, so I knew that retrieving the photographs may be possible.  I loaded up a copy of Lexar Image Rescue that I had received when I purchased one of their cards (The card that I was recovering from was manufactured by SanDisk), I set the program to scan and retrieve all images.  It found a couple of hundred TIFs, but when I retrieved them and changed the extension, viola, my RAW images were back!  Needless to say that rookie card is going into forced retirement.

Here are 3 of the memorable moments that I retrieved.

Technical Details:
Canon 5D, 135 f/2 lens

5 Tips for Improved Photographs at WeddingsPosted by drfl on May 10th, 2010

At the end of my Arkansas-St. Louis adventure was a wedding.  First, I would like to say congratulations to the happy couple!  Second, while shooting the wedding as a guest, I thought of a few tips that may help others get the most out of photographing these events, and indeed they apply to many different activities. Here are 5 tips that may help you improve your photographs at weddings.

Tip 1. Keep the Depth of Field as shallow as (almost) possible.

Weddings have a lot going on, participants bustling about, scurrying to get in position or across the venue, children running to one relative to another, and guests trying to get seated. Once the music queues, everyone quiets, and the procession begins, hundreds of shutter clicks create they’re own conversation. As the beautiful bride strolls down the aisle, keep the Depth of Field to a minimum and then continue to use low settings. This will accentuate your subject and keep the background activities (see children above) from detracting in your composition. Prior to the event, test your lenses with different settings to see what’s best at what aperture. I have found with my 135 f/2 that 2.0 – 2.8 is ideal, while on my 50 CM 3.2 – 3.5 is the best range. One of the huge benefits that digital SLRs have over point and shoots is the larger sensors when combined with shallow lenses create some great blurred out backgrounds, use this advantage.

Tip 2. When shooting the bride and groom (or other man/woman combinations), place your focus point on the man.

Men show lines better, or they don’t care as much, either way, women are senstive to blemishes. When selecting focus on the man, if the woman is not in exactly on the same plane of focus, she will fall slightly out of focus. Generally, this lack of focus isn’t consciously noticeable, but it may lightly blur those features that she doesn’t like.

Read the rest of this entry »

Using the Canon 135mm f/2L as a 189 f/2.8 – SamplesPosted by drfl on April 13th, 2010

As promised, today I have two sample images from the Canon 135 f/2L with the Canon EF Extender 1.4x II mounted.  This is the shortest lens that allows this combinations and my experience with this was quite good, excellent, in fact.  The autofocus continues to be snappy, most of my photos achieved focus quickly, perhaps not quite as fast as without the teleconverter, but the difference was barely noticeable.  Image quality is excellent, the sharpness and bokeh are still very good.   Additionally, this combination maintains the minimum 2.8 aperture, which provides for the extra sensitivity on the diagonal cross type center focus points on most Canon DSLRs.  I have no hesitation in using the 1.4 teleconverter in almost any situation if I found myself a little more distant from my subject.

All images were captured with a Canon 5D (Original Flavor), 135 f/2L lens, and a Canon EF Extender 1.4x II.

Shot at f/2.8

Shot at f/2.8

This lens is great for portraits, but how is it for other purposes? On Thursday I plan on exploring this question.

135mm of Pure JoyPosted by drfl on April 12th, 2010

After over a year of waiting and much debate, I decided to order a Canon 135 f/2l lens.  Being primarily a landscape/wildlife photographer, this lens wasn’t on anywhere close to my future purchase shortlist (I was holding out for a 17 or 24 tilt/shift) for quite a while.  Reviews of this lens are nothing short of rave.  On every merchant website I visited this lens never scored below a 4 out of 5 and the vast majority of those reviews were 5s.  I have never seen any product that didn’t have at least 1 bad review since usually, there’s one or two people out there ready to throw out a bad review for any little thing.  This lens had none of that and there were literally hundreds of reviews. 

So what were the main motivating factors that pushed me towards this lens?

• As my portraiture kept picking up, I needed a lens with a fast autofocus (lots of fast kids). 
• Compatibility with Canon teleconverters, both the 1.4x and 2x support autofocus on all Canon cameras (making it a 189 f/2.8 and a 270 f/4 lens).
• I needed a lens that allowed me to capture a greater rate of in-focus photographs in lower light.

The 135 arrived on Friday so I spent the weekend field testing it.  As I am not into photographing brick walls, looking at charts, or studying diagrams I am going to include my subjective thoughts and observations into today’s posts.  If you need charts and graphs, feel free to look at the hundreds of sites dedicated to that.  Frankly, it gives me a headache and keeps me from shooting.

I’ll begin by what I expected.  Since this lens is at the top of every portrait photographer’s list and is recognized for its sharpness, I expected to receive a lens that was sharp, provides a good working distance between my subject and I, and gave excellent bokeh, color, and contrast.  When I finally had it in my hand and attached to a camera I found that I was wrong on 4 counts.  The lens is extremely sharp, has incredible bokeh, fabulous color, and phenomenal contrast.  In short, the lens exceeded my every expectation (well, except my working distance one, I guess, but how do you improve on that?).

Next, I’ll mention how it compares to what I already own.  In the normal and short to long telephoto arena I currently own a 70-200 f/4l (Non-IS), 300 f/4l (IS), and a 50mm compact macro lens.  The “fastest” lens I had owned previously was the 50 which opened up to 2.5.  This lens gives me some great depth-of-field, and it has some good bokeh associated, but the autofocus is horrendous and the working distance was a tad close.  The lens is primarily meant to be a macro lens with the primary mode of focus being manual so it often hunts to obtain focus.  This makes this “fast” lens not so fast when it comes to snapping portraits, especially of constantly moving children. 

My  300 f/4l focuses quickly and was my sharpest lens.  Not great as a general-purpose human portrait lens (as opposed to animal portrait), but it has great bokeh.  This was the sharpness benchmark that I expected the 135 to exceed.

The 70-200 f/4l covers the 135 focal range and was the primary reason I held off on purchasing this lens for so long.  I have owned this lens longer than any other and I use it frequently for portraits.  The focus is fairly snappy, however, this lens lacked when it came to focusing inside and was not as fast as I needed more often than I was willing to admit. 

Finally, I’m going to post some photos.  These exemplify the beauty of this lens.  My focus rate was extremely high and I used various focus points.  Really, I felt like I was holding a whole new camera, the autofocus was that fast!  The sharpness of the lens and the way that the rest of the image melts away from the area in focus is simply superb. All photos below were taken with a Canon 5d (Original flavor) and 135 f/2l.

Taken at f/2.5

Taken at f/2.5

Taken at f/2.8

Taken at f/2.5

Taken at f/2.5

Frankly, this lens begs to be used at wide-open apertures. I never saw myself stopping down beyond about f/3.2, except for a test. If you have any reservations about this lens, cancel them now and order.

As a side note, when I was researching this lens, many forums discussed the benefits of placing the 1.4x extender on this lens, but there were no examples, so I will be discussing that aspect of this lens in tomorrow’s post.

Return of the Leaf Eaters: More People PicturesPosted by drfl on November 12th, 2009

Technical Details: Canon 5d, 70-200 f/4l @ 180mm, f/4, 1/400 sec.

So, once again I had the chance to photograph a couple of stellar subjects, little McCoy and little Tommy. These photos are from two different shoots, but both little guys decided that eating leaves was for them! Needless to say this activity did not continue for too long as both mommies made sure they saved room for dinner.

On a technical note, some may notice that I use an original Canon 5d for these photographs. While the 5d Mark II also does a spectacular job, I have found that this camera really works for me for portraits. The file size is perfect since I really don’t need 21 megapixels for these images. I liked it so much that when my 5d wouldn’t power on, I had to send it away for repair quickly since I knew these photo shoots were coming up.

Anyway, here are a few of my favorites!

Technical Details: Canon 5d, 70-200 f/4l @ 126mm, f/4.5, 1/200 sec.

Technical Details: Canon 5d, 70-200 f/4l @ 200mm, f/4.5, 1/640 sec.

Technical Details: Canon 5d, 70-200 f/4l @ 140mm, f/5, 1/500 sec.