Lessons

Lesson Info

Lens Maintenance

Okay, let's, dive into lens maintenance what sort of things do we need to do with lenses to maintain them? Keep the quality because we want to keep him, we're going to use him as much as we need to, and then when we're done, we can sell them and pass them on, so keeping the lens clean, I generally use a micro fiber clock. There are throwaway tissues, but they seem kind of wasteful to me, there's all sorts of other little gimmicks and pens that can work just fine, but the simple micro fiber cloth works completely fine for me. Occasionally I'll need some air for cleaning the lens. I do use compressed air to clean sometimes the outside if there's a little bit of dust on the lands, this does a really good job of cleaning some of that off. You do need to be careful about how you hold this, because if you hold it upside down, it can spray propellants onto your lands and damage your lens. I generally don't need any lens cleaning fluid. I usually use a little bit of hot air. I'll blow it onto ...

the lands and gets a little bit of moisture so that if I have a raindrop or something, I can use that and a cleaning cloth and clean off the front of the lens. For cleaning the outside barrel of the land sometimes on my more adventurous trips right encounter a lot of dust, I'll bring a little paint brush or toothbrush for just kind of scrubbing away and cleaning off all that dust that gathers up around the lives, especially lands that zooms and extends you want to try to clean that office much you can't you don't want to drag that into the lands I've seen some lenses that they zoom back and forth and they kind of suck that air in and it gets brought in in between the elements and then it's pretty much impossible to clean protecting the front of the lands is a challenging issue for a lot of people that they have questions on because we've got lens caps, we got lens hood's and we've got filters and we've talked about pretty much all of these, so if you want to use the lens cap there's some good things and there's some bad things about it so it's obviously nice protection when you're not using your lands. Of course the downside is is that it is a constant hassle to take that thing on and off losing it and it actually is a great place where it collects dust so that when you put it on your camera there's dust right there on the front of your lens as it shakes around, you get that dust on your lands and so I am personally not a big fan of lens caps filters are great ways of protecting your lenses all the time, and so this is going to improve the weather ceiling on certain cameras because they have elements that are moving behind the filter inside and so that'll protect him a little bit. You know, I don't want to say that it's gonna make your pictures lower quality, but it's not going to improve the quality, okay, it might at best, just hold the original quality of the lands, and we do have the cost of buying a filter because of good filter is going to cost you well at this point thirty, forty, fifty, sixty bucks, depending on the brand and the size of the limbs that you're going to be using. So finally, we have the lens hood's, which I highly recommend using most all the time because it prevents flare, you get better contrast on your images and blocks all those lights, as well as preventing a little bit of rain from landing on the front of your lens, because provides a little roof over the front of it. The downside is, is that by using the lens hood's, it's going to increase the size of the lands, which means you often have to reverse the land's hood so that it fits on your lens and still fits in your camera bag, and you gotta turn it around and block it and it's not gonna work with built in flash as well and there's some cases where if you're shooting out of windows of cars or trains, it's going to catch the wind and it's actually going to cause more vibrations in your lens, but those air pretty unusual combinations, so the fact of the matter is, is that you probably don't need to use all three, and you can pick one or two whatever one's work best for you. Now, as far as what I see most serious photographers doing out there very common is they forgo the filter because they don't want to interfere with the lens in anyway, they'll use lens caps, and then they'll use their lens hood's. And so you get the optimum image quality you do have the minor hassle of on and off with landscapes and reversing the hoods. The system that I use that I'm very happy with is using a filter and a hood because I hate lens caps, lens caps get lost, they get broken, they carry dust and I'd just rather not use them at all, and so the filter gives me really good protection, and the only household that I need to have is reversing the lens hood. And so that's, the only thing I need to do I come more from a photojournalist background where I just want to pick my camera out of the bag and be ready to shoot, and so I don't mind using a filter, and I don't mind reversing the hood, and so pretty much always all the serious photographers are always using the hood's it's just kind of a question if you would rather use a cap or a filter and it's a personal choice up to you f fine tuned, and so some of you are not going to be happy to hear this. The expensive camera that you bought the expensive linds you bought doesn't necessarily work perfectly when you test it. What happens is that your lens has very, very tight tolerance is that it just tuned to, but there's a little wiggle room and your camera is tuned. A certain tolerance is, and it has a little wiggle room as well, and if those two wiggle rooms don't match up correctly, your lands is gonna appear to front focus orb back. Focus on a regular basis, so focusing in front of your subject or focusing behind your subject and if they're your camera and lens combination is doing this on a regular basis it's not that uncommon. This is a problem that we've had in the past and when you had it in the past, you took your camera and your lens or lenses and you sent him back to nikon they worked on him for a little while and then they sent it back to you and you were out your gear for a couple of weeks. Now they allow you to do the work yourself, so the way this works is that you were going to need a target to test your focus on, okay? And then what you're gonna do is you're going to need to see if you're focusing in front of or behind your target so you can use another device for checking to see if you're in focus in front or behind that subject. Now if you want you khun by especially designed focussing target for checking, I'm focusing here is infront focus in front behind or behind or in front of that subject. Now if you're thrifty and creative, you can create your own system all right? So I just used a ruler and a yardstick I focus on the ruler which is here lined up with the ten inch mark and if nine inches is in focus than some things a little bit off if eleven inches and focuses I'm back focus and I can make adjustments in the camera and so I did this with my camera and most of the cameras out there allow you to adjust the focus setting from minus twenty two plus twenty and what you're looking for is where is the sharpest point and that's where you want to set it out? So when I said it at minus twenty it's clearly front focusing minus ten it's front focusing zero it's front focusing a little bit plus ten it's back focusing plus twenty is back focusing even mohr and so I've taken five pictures by going into my camera's menu system under a fine too and not all nikon cameras have this the d a ten the d seven fifty I believe the d seventy two hundred has it, but I'm not one hundred percent certain I think it does, but the higher in cameras tend to have this and I think it's easiest just to shoot a hole bracket siri's like this to see where your camera is that having seen this, I know that my cameron needs to be somewhere between zero and ten and so in this case I'm going to say probably three or four is where I would set it out. Now this problem is unique to each camera and each limb, so you need to test this on each camera and each lens so the way that you do this fine tuning is you need whatever cameras you're using all the lenses that you use you're going to set up to take the sharpest picture possible, which means you need a tripod cable release you need some sort of target to focus on and I think a ruler works really well and then a measuring device either another ruler or a measuring tape or yardstick is gonna work just fine you're going to need to set your camera for optimum image quality and the shallowest of the field possible. So either aperture priority or manual with wide open aperture lois auto focus and then mere lock up an image stabilization officer that you're getting the sharpest pictures possible from a tripod. What you do is you manually unfocused the lands and so we just grab a lens here it doesn't really matter which lands and so what I would do is I would line everything up and then I would manually unfocused the lands and then I would go to the camera and I would let the camera focus on it and that way I know the camera has something out of focus and it thinks it's in focus and at that point I'd lock the mirror up and I'd fire the shutter and then I play the image back and I magnify and I looked to see if it's a sharp image or not now to be honest with you when I test I really want to be sure about things, so what I'll do is I'll do a couple of tests unfocused it let the camera focus it unfocused it again and I'll let the camera do it again and sometimes unfocused in this direction take a shot and then unfocused in this direction and take a shot so that it is the camera is achieving focus from different sides of the issue you're trying to figure out how accurate your camera is and figuring out where the exact focus point is if you notice that there's a consistent problem it's always behind or it's always in front that's where this is going to help out now who needs to do this entry level users with the eighteen to fifty five need not worry okay the thing is is that with your lenses that you have you don't have super shallow depth of field so you're not going to notice a minor discrepancy in the focusing so the people that need to do this are people that have telephoto lenses that have fast apertures eighty five one eight eighty five one four one five two one thirty five to two hundred to two hundred two eights three hundred two eights and so forth the faster longer lenses even some of the wider faster lenses like a thirty five one four and twenty one four would probably be recommended now when you do this I would probably set aside one hour by the time you get everything set up and all the things done it takes me about an hour before I get my first shots and get everything calibrated in the camera. So it takes a little bit of time. But these are the steps in order to make that happen.