Lessons
Class Introduction
07:11 2Canon Lens Basics
14:12 3Focal Length: Angle of View
11:31 4Focal Length: Normal Lenses
09:43 5Focal Length: Wide Angle Lenses
18:15 6Focal Length: Telephoto Lens
21:27 7Focal Length Rule of Thumb
15:36 8Field of View
10:14Aperture Basics
04:41 10Aperture: Maximum Aperture
18:44 11Aperture: Equivalent Focal Length
07:48 12Aperture: Depth of Field
06:23 13Aperture: Maximum Sharpness
08:33 14Aperture: Starburst Effect
05:18 15Aperture: Flare
06:48 16Aperture: Hyperfocal Distance
19:32 17Camera Mount System
14:57 18Canon Lens Compatibility
14:26 19Canon Lens Design
12:29 20Canon Lens Composition
04:30 21Canon Lens Shape
05:50 22Canon Lens Coating
06:53 23Canon Lens Focusing
14:10 24Lens Autofocus
08:17 25Canon Lens Image Stabilization
06:57 26Canon L Lenses
10:18 27Image Quality
09:46 28Canon Zoom Lenses: Standard
17:50 29Canon Super Zooms
05:20 30Canon Wide Zooms
09:48 31Canon Telephoto Zooms
16:09 32Prime Lens: Normal Lenses
09:19 33Prime Lens: Moderate Wide
07:01 34Prime Lens: Wide Angle
05:33 35Prime Lens: Ultra-Wide
09:23 36Prime Lens: Short Telephoto
09:03 37Prime Lens: Medium Telephoto
08:59 38Prime Lens: Super Telephoto
13:59 393rd Party Lenses Overview
06:01 403rd Party Prime Lenses
15:25 413rd Party Zoom Lenses
26:28 42Lens Accessories: Filters
33:42 43Lens Accessories: Lens Hoods
09:58 44Lens Accessories: Tripod Mount
04:51 45Lens Accessories: Extension Tubes
04:30 46Lens Accessories: Extenders
13:11 47Macro Lens: Reproduction Ratio
18:59 48Macro Lens: Technique and Choices
25:59 49Fisheye: Technique and Choices
18:49 50Tilt Shift: Techniques and Choices
27:08 51Make a Lens System Choice
05:37 52Choosing A Portrait Lens
17:21 53Choosing A Sports Lens
17:31 54Choosing A Landscape Lens
10:39 55Best Lenses for You
08:46 56Lens Maintenance
11:19 57Buying and Selling Lens
11:15 58What is John Greengo's Favorite Lens?
08:37Lesson Info
Aperture: Maximum Sharpness
maximum sharpness, trying to get the sharpest possible pictures with our lenses. And so we always want to get sharp pictures. The theory is, lenses should be optically perfect. Win shot wide open. That's that's the theory. But let's check reality. Reality is, is they're not OK on. The problem is, is there's imperfections that are disguised and hidden by stopping the lens down. So you may have a 1.2 lens. If you stop it down to two or to eight, it's gonna get sharper, all right, until a certain point, okay? And so, ideally, they would be perfectly sharp, wide open, but they're not. And there's a reason for that. And it's called the fraction all right, and it has to do with the way light works. And we're not going to do a full physics physics class here on you, But we're gonna talk a little bit about the way light works. Diffraction is light scatter as a result of passing through an opening. Okay, so we have our lands lights coming through the lens. We're gonna close our aperture down to...
a fairly small opening, and his light goes through that lens. It hits the edges of those blades, and it gets redirected just a little bit. Okay, you can imagine throwing a baseball, and it just nicks the edge of the wall and it changes direction. That's what happens to the light. And so when Light is supposed to be going straight, it gets slightly deflected, and that's gonna cause a little bit of loss of sharpness. And this happens mawr. The smaller you go, the smaller that opening this. And so the question is, is what's the best aperture that I should shoot at? So let's take a look at a sample shot that I wanted to shoot to see what is the sharpest aperture with this particular lens. What I did is I blew up small sections from the center of the photograph as well as the edge of the photograph, and I shot this several times from 1.42 F 22 you can look at these images and judge for yourself. Which aperture yields the sharpest photographs and which ones are the blurry ist now, Depending on what sort of screen you're looking at, you may not be able to see it if you have a small phone that you're looking at this with. But I can tell you right now that 1. does not look very sharp. There's a lot of problems with this lands, especially on this little tiny camera lens, which is so bad for two reasons. Number one lenses air not perfect when they're shot wide open at 1.4 in this case, and secondly, this sample is from the extreme edge of the frame. Lenses tend to be sharper in the middle and softer over on the side. And so everything on the bottom row, I would say, is going to be less sharp than on the top row because it's from the edge of the frame. But looking at this, if I go all the way out to F 22 it's not quite a sharp, and it's because of diffraction. Around 5.6 on this lands is where this lens is the sharpest. Now, the way that you can figure out where your lenses the sharpest is one to test it and just see what works for you. But a good general idea rule of thumb is that the sharpest apertures are in the middle of the range, so figure out the range. If it's 1.4 to it's gonna be around 5.6. If your lenses Ford F is gonna probably be around F All right, so with a full frame sensor and a 1.4 lens, you're gonna have imperfections that are going to get reduced as you go to to and to eight NF four. And by the time you're at four and 56 you're looking at really good sharpness from that particular lands. And if you put that same lens on a crop frame camera, it's the same lens. It's gonna act exactly the same way. Those imperfections are going to disappear at the same rate, and they're going to be equally sharp here. But this is where things change up a little bit because of diffraction, and so diffraction gets worse as we go F 11 16 20 to and on the crop frame sensor that that diffraction zone changes sooner than it does on the full free. What's different about it? We have the same lens mounted on these two. What's deferred is the sensor, and it's not the sensor size. Even though I have different size sensors here, it's the pixels on the sensors, and so diffraction is impacted by the pixel size, not the sensor size. So here's what's going on pixel level in your camera. All right, so this top example is for a full frame camera. Let's just look at a group of pixels nine in this case on the bottom one, because they tend to have smaller pixels and more pixels crammed in a smaller area. They have smaller size pixels. Okay, now the circle in the middle indicates a point of light that we're focusing on. And as we change, our aperture from 1.4 to 1 point to this point of light slightly grows because of diffraction, but it hasn't grown very much. It's still very much on one dot here. It's very much on one's one pixel here, but it's slightly overlapping into its neighboring pixels. And if it starts overlapping too much, that's when we start noticing a loss in sharpness and we go to F 2.8. It grows ever so slightly, but we're still improving problems with lens, and that's kind of having the greatest impact as to why we're getting sharper, so we get down to 5.6 and this is where our lands is really doing well. It's at its sharpest. But as we get down to F eight notice in the lower example, what's going on? That circle is now encompassing not only the square in the middle, but ah lot of the nearby squares next door, which is causing a loss of sharpness because that one point of light needs to go toe one pixel, not nine pixels, that causes blurriness. And so the smaller your pixels, the sooner this diffraction starts off, and the further you go, the worse it gets, the smaller your pixels. And so if you have one of the very compact cameras the point and shoot cameras that has 20 megapixels on it, you're going to hit that diffraction price, perhaps at F 456 depending on the size of those pixels. And if we stop our leads all the way down to F yes, we're gonna have a fair bit of diffraction on our full frame camera. But our camera that has more densely packed pixels is gonna have even mawr diffraction And so the prime place that you set your lens depends on the lens itself and the camera and how many pixels and what size those pixels are. And there's some people that would probably like me to geek out for the next hour on diffraction, and we're not gonna do it. We're only going to take it so far, folks, but I just I need you to be aware of. You don't want to be over here. If you're trying to get the sharpest point in your lands and you don't want to be down here, do I shoot it F 32. Do I shoot it? F 1.4? Absolutely, yes, it's absolutely necessary in certain types of photography. The reason this is handy information is that you don't go there if you don't need Teoh and the more you know about when you need it and when you don't need it. This is good, helpful information. So if you don't need F 32 don't set F 32 F 22 is better, and that's same with 16 and 11 and eight so kind of my default steadiness. Well, I would prefer that my lens be said it f eight and I will change it if and when necessary. Now, if you would like a home study project because there's just only so far we're gonna go in this class, I'm gonna give you three terms here and you can go look these up and you can study these and you can read the Wikipedia page. And you can google this and find all sorts of photographers that like to write white papers at ad nauseum about details of pixel size, the airy disc and my favorite, the circle of confusion, which I always thought surrounded me. But apparently it has something to do with the size of light as it's focused through your lands. And so all of this will impact the diffraction and the sharpness of your images. And perhaps someday I will even take this further and go into this area. But I want to give you a little bit of something extra that you guys can go into on your own
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
user-b3a96c
I so appreciate what a good teacher John is. I wish I would have known this much about lenses when I first started out buying my lenses. It was hard finding information about lenses. I didn't want to spend money on a lens I wouldn't use. The better understanding we have about our gear the better photographers we will be. I have never seen a class like this. Invaluable...yes I bought the class! I am really impressed with the high quality photography classes available on Creative Live!
Tami Miller
Have loved the other John Greengo classes I've watched & purchased - and this is another winner! Having been a high school/college science teacher, it is refreshing to take a course with someone who not only is extremely experienced, seems to be a computer having stored so much knowledge, but is equally concerned about making the information truly understandable to different levels. And he shares the information using every tool he can: slides, video, interactive presentations, and great quizzes. I learned so much about my Canon lenses - and lenses in general with their many components. I am excited about testing each of mine to see what macro ratio they handle, and especially appreciated the tutorial on testing each for their specific quirk that affects super sharpness. This class is great whether you own Canon lenses or not. Thanks John Greengo!
Abbeylynne
This was a great class not just about the lenses that Canon offers but also how each lens works. As usual, John's slides are alway informative and entertaining. There is a phrase: John has a slide for that! I am not even a Canon user and found this class to have great information for the use of each specific lens. Great work John! Thank you Creative Live for another great class!
Student Work
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Fundamentals