Lessons

Lesson Info

Lenses

last session I threw at you like with the fire hose all these concepts that are swirling around in my head but I'm in the field trying to capture an image and I find it's hard to think about if you just look at him all at once so the way we've laid out the handbook for this particular course the thing the pdf file you get if you purchase the course is the section on composition divides all the ideas that I talked about up into little concept's each that can fit on the come into a business card and we've laid it out so you could print it on an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper and then cut down the lines that divide these and actually make them into cards what a ham on screen right now is a preliminary layout this isn't the final layout because we know not everybody's printers print all the way to the edge of the page so right now the text of the top is too close to the edge that kind of thing but it just gives you a sense for what my wife karen is working on which will give you...

a lot of the majority these concepts presented to you in this form in that way you could deal yourself three of these put them in your back pocket when you're in the field and remind yourself of these concepts and really get it so it's integrated and you think about him eventually hopefully getting them all in your head cool had been clarification for the chat rooms please sure they're they're talking and asking a lot about the concepts that you that you mentioned are the concepts more than just composition well that depends I mean the first session we talked about was just how I organize the scene into a compelling image and me that's composition I'm sure there are other concepts that were there but what we're going to talk it out later on we talk about shooting strategies that's when we're going to talk more about now what camera settings so I use what's different about different lenses that I use in the field and how do I think about that so yeah there will be some things where once I get the composition I like now in order to get what I trillion vision I need a very specific lens it's in orderto have the subject matter interact with a background in a certain way part of that will actually be in this gear section two great perfect thank you sir all right so let's talk about gear I have the contents of my camera bag largely emptied onto the table there are a few elements on the ground and I'll pick up you know as I describe them because there's not that much space on the table but let's take a look you might think that the most important part would be your camera but I don't think it is you could hand me a camera from nineteen sixty two and I should be able to take really good photos with it if I'm good a tte at photography the camera is one of the least important elements there are some instances when it's really important if you shoot in extremely low light then your camera will be important because some of them need to have low light performance that doesn't look overly noisy things like that but in general the camera is one of the least important elements one of the maurin part mint elements would be the glass you shoot with the lenses now don't think of the lenses that I have is what you need or anything life hat in fact the last thing you need is more gear what you need is to be able to take better photographs with the gear you already have in the only time I think about buying mortgage ear is when I'm complaining about the gear I already have not when I redid story about some lens that I don't have and I lust for it no it's when I'm in the field and I'm trying to capture an image and I'm unable to because of the limitations of my gear and I know there's some solution out there that would allow me to get what I was envisioning then sure I wantto another piece of glass but if you ever have to walk up to somebody and I did this early on I asked a friend of mine what should I get next from the next lens you know christmas is coming up I want to get a lens and it's like if you don't know what lens you need you don't need a lens what she need to do is get better at this stuff you have and on lee when you complaining about what you have where it can't do something specific is when I would think about getting new stuff if you have all the lenses in the world it's just too much stuff to deal with mentally if you're not already good at using it so also a lot of people will look at photographs and ask me what camera was that what lens was that or something like that in to me that's a little less important than what we started with the composition and some of the shooting stuff will talk about it's kind of like if you're into cooking and you're talking about the pots and pans so the knives how important is that compared to the actual cooking skills that air there you should be able to cook with any knives any pots and pans if you're good at it so the gear can help you a little bit but it's not as essential I don't want you to buy everything I have so let's think a little bit about uh the lenses that I use now here I have a diagram on my screen that my wife karen made for me which was nice and it talks a little bit about how I think about lenses so all we have here is an overhead view of some objects we could photograph here we have a person you're seeing the top of him sitting there a car like a train box car and then a really long hedge thinking about some trees or something in the distance and that might be our subject matter I'm just going to talk about hollis relates to uh the lenses that you might use so first off most people I find when they think of lenses is they stand in a particular position and they look at what's in front of them and they say okay I need a particular lynch to fit whatever it is that's in front of me in the frame maybe to make whatever it is I'm shooting to fill the frame or leave a little bit in the surroundings and so I could come in here and if this is my camera this little line we'll zoom up a little bit here represents my camera sensor and it's not to scale my camera sensor is not as big as a person but it represents where that might be positioned I could put on a wide angle lens which would give me a really wide for you of my image the reason why I have this kind of unusual shape that's here like two triangles is actually inside the lens the light actually comes to a point and then spreads out again and it makes it so things are actually upside down and backwards on the actual camera sensor but that's just going to be helpful in describing a certain quality of the lens but here if we used a wide angle lens I might be able to get the entire hedge the entire box car everything else in the frame if I switch to a different lens and did not change my position I went to a more of a medium lens instead of a wide angle I'm going to get a more limited view of my composition in that if I switched to a long lens notice it telephoto I'm going to get only a small portion of my composition you said that with zooming lenses well first let's talk about why when you talk about wide angle lenses why are the numbers for those lenses really low like a seventeen millimetre or a thirty five millimeter that kind of stuff well if you actually look at where the camera sensor is in all I'm doing right here is drawing a line from the edge of the camera's sensor out the edge of the camera's sensor out and where it crosses here that's the focal length of your lens if you hear of thirty five millimeters or fifty millimeters or hundred millimeters it's how far it is from the camera sensor to the point where the light crosses inside the lens if you were to measure that distance and millimeters that's what you'd have your lens so is I get longer lenses longer lenses that crossing point is getting further and further away from the camera sensor and if you were to measure it in millimeters the number would be getting higher and higher does it get way out here it's much further away to be a longer or a higher number so whenever I talk about a long lens it means that this is a long way away from that it usually means physically the lens is going to be long in the end on it just means that that little point with light crosses inside your lens is further away from the censor and if you were to actually measure it from here to the sensor however many millimeters that is that's how many millimeter lens you have two hundred millimeter lands for hundred millimeter that kind of stuff you don't have to know that at all but there's some qualities of this is really going to be helpful and thinking about lenses because I rarely think about lenses in this way where I stand in one position and I'll zoom my lens to fill the frame instead what I do is I think about how does the lens that I'm using affect the relationship between the subject I'm shooting in its background how's it relate so let's see if here we have these different lenses let's see how he could do this in different ways let's say the main subject I want to shoot is the car I want the car to fill the frame of my camera that's what I'm looking to dio well let's see what it would be a ce faras the difference with using different lenses let's start off with a wide angle lens with a wide angle lens if I wanted to make the car fill the frame wouldn't I have tow walk closer to the car until that little angle of view the things that are in my frame fill the car does that make sense she'd walk forward until the car fills the frame if I take a medium lens that might not get all the car in the frame yet so I might need a back up walk further away until the entire car fits the frame does that make sense and if I grab a really long lens that only shows me part of my scene in order to get the car to fill the frame I'm going to need the walk ups get the right layer active I'm gonna need to walk back back back way back in order to be able to get the car in the frame you know if you take a telephoto lens one that's designed for shooting wildlife you try to shoot a car with it you're gonna have to be you know football field away and get the car to fill the frame does that make sense well that's often what I'm thinking about when it comes to lenses is not how how am I going to get to fill the frame by zooming is I think about how it's the now that subject gonna relate to its background and let's see the difference so here's our wide angle lens look at how much of the background would be in the frame imagine that you could see above the car you know and below it or something so you could actually see what's back there but do you see how you would get the majority of the hedge that's back there filling the frame you get the entire box car with a lot of space around it but then if I were to switch from that wide angle lens and instead use a medium lens then notice we're getting a lot less of the hedge hartley in the box car is almost filling the frame in the background there's not all that extra space that was on the side of it when we had the wider lens if I switch then to the really long lens I still got the car filling my frame but now I might not even be able to see the hedge do you see how it's really getting the background to fill that frame just part of the boxcar so you see that changing the lens that you're using in walking further away or closer is going to change the relationship between the main subject matter that you might be filling the frame with in what's behind it does that make any sense so put these back on here so I'm going to show you some examples of this and just think about what's going on here um when it comes to the wide versus the long so if my main subject matters here in the foreground with a wide lands I'm going to see a lot in the background in the box car is going to feel smaller because look at how much space there is on this side of it look at much space there is on this side of it were as with the longer lens which is the smaller shape boxcar is going to get cut off in the end it's going to feel huge in the background so let's see how that affects it in an actual picture here we're at cadillac ranch in amarillo texas cadillac ranch is a cow pasture in the middle of the cow pasture are ten cadillacs from the nineteen fifties one for each year so you can see the difference in the tail fins on the back that kind of thing and this is the gate that you go through so the cows don't get out when you want to go there so you'd pull up you come up here you go through that gate and in the distance way in the distance if you can see him there's one two three four five six seven eight nine ten cars you see him now this was shot with a wide angle lens let me look at what it is because I wrote it down so fourteen millimeter that's about the widest lens you khun get but on a full frame camera that's the widest lens you can get without getting distortion where the it turns into a fish islands where things really bend on the edges you can get a fourteen millimeter what's called a rectilinear lens it's used a lot for architecture shooting the interiors could get a lot of the interior on dh that's what I shot with here now any time I use a wide angle lens it's like having that diagram I had in photo shop if you look at the blue shape that's in here wide angle lens you see how much of the background you're going to see and notice the boxcar that's there that it's not going to feel all that big because a lot of space on the right of it a lot of space in the left of it so it's not filling the frame right now I'm going to switch to a long lens a long lens is going to be more like this red shape that's here what that's going to do is if I back away from my scenes so that might one subject matter I'm going to keep at a consistent size which is the entry gate that's there then what's it going to do to the cars that are in the dest since instead of feeling like a small element that's far away it's gonna pull that in and make it feel much closer in much larger so let's see what it looks like here's with wide angle lens boom like that that's a long lens so in order to capture this image I needed to back up at least a semi truck length behind me because you put on a long lens and all I would see is this little sign thing on the top that's all it could fit in the frame I needed a back way the heck up until I could still see this hole gate but do you see what it did to the background so oftentimes when I choose a lynch to shoot with it's less about how much can I put in the frame which is like the standard way of thinking when you get started you're like oh I need a zoom lens of this kind so I can fit this car in the frame now I think about instead how doe I want what I'm shooting to relate to its background and therefore what lens did I want to use and what you'll find is wide angle lenses exaggerate thie yeah difference between what's in the background on what's in the foreground they're going to feel farther apart is you go to a wider and wider lens as you get to more of a medium lens you're going to feel more normal or and then as you goto a telephoto it's going to compress the space between near and far objects and that's often times what I'm thinking about when I'm choosing a lens so let's take a look at a few examples of that hear him in iceland in iceland I see these little buildings which I think look cool and I'm sitting there going all right but there's all this kind of neutral and just semi interesting things around it what it's our my possibilities a positive things in the surroundings in one thing my eye goes to is the mountains in the background and so I'm thinking well what if I want these buildings with the mountains in the background how can I get the mountains in the background to be much larger than they are without getting these buildings smaller well longer lends a longer lens will compress space bringing faraway things much closer and so what I do is I walk is far away from these buildings as I can get without bumping into something a telephone pole that we get in the way another building or I might have to go up or down a hill that would suddenly get these out of the view I walk as far away from these buildings as I can and I'd find the longest lens that will still keep this in the frame and what do I end up with this slightly different angle excited you know walk around things but do you see those mountains now are much closer compared to the old ones where you could almost not even tell they were there but a longer lens is going to do that it will take a while if you're not used to that thought to get that in your head because for me I was just so used to a zoom lens meaning that it just gets more or less in the frame and I didn't think about how it makes near and far objects relate to each other another example here is a motel on route sixty six and you see how far away the motel is get a longer lands move further away and now look at how far away the sinus slightly different angle but but you see how I can pull that in close here I think this is delicate arch in arches national park there's another arch on the way to it you have to climb up a little bit to see through it I got up there and like somebody else is already in here on got this but I thought well this is too far away teo really be part of the photo it's I know it's there but if somebody else if I just showed this to him they might not know it's even there it's so small and far away that's because I didn't write down the millimeters and we find out what it is here this was shot with a fifteen millimeter lenses probably fish islands it's my guess there s o the wider the angle lens you get the more it exaggerates the distance between things in that arch in the distance feels tiny so moves far back as I can from that where I can still see through it and I can still see the arch in the distance as far back as I can and then figure out now what lens did I need that's still going to keep that filled into the frame and now you can see how close I've pulled that arch compared to a wide angle lens it's a different angle so this feels like a different shape because behind this you can't stay up high enough where you can see through it and still be at that same angle I was at before you'd be floating in space you know so I had to be in a slightly different angle but I think the difference is dramatic and it's all about the lens then we are the that example so if you go back in photo shop and you see why do I back up this far as I possibly can well because then I could get the longest lens I can to do this because otherwise if I don't back up very far on I put on a long lens I'm not going to see all of the subject that was in front of me instead I'm going to see a small portion of it so I need to back up a ce far as it can and then see what lens would it take to keep that front subjects still filling the frame whatever lens that isthe I'll have to test you know try one lens and guests and then try another but it's going to really determine the difference between subject and background start to make a little bit of sense so oftentimes that's the biggest reason why I choose a particular lens not just how much will fill the frame so what I suggest you do if you're not used to this concept is take two lenses you have if you happen to have two one that's why do one that's telephoto take the wide lens in zoom it all the way to his wide as it goes and take a piece of tape and put a piece of tape over the zoom ring so you can't get in there and zoom it I use gaffer's tape which is his black tape it's easily removable and I just put it over there and so this lens is now a wide angle lens it cannot zoom then take it telephoto lens assume it all the way this telephoto za goes or maybe medium medium to his long depends on what lens you have put a piece of tape on the zoom rings they can't sit there and zoom like you're used to and just shoot the same subjects all day with those two lenses just like you say you want to try to take a vertical and a horizontal of things each time well try a wide angle in a telephoto lens on everything you shoot for a day or three days or a week and tell your brain gets around the concept of how it makes the foreground and the background relate to each other once you get that take that tape off and start incorporating that thought in your head so you can start controlling what's going on with um that relationship another thing when it comes to lenses that I think about is the depth of field depth of field means how much stuff is in focus and so if you look at this image this image was taken in africa and I just thought these eggs look amazing but look at the background and notice that it's just goingto nothing back there and look at this background this is in an area called the pollux ce which is near uh that tacoma no not coma over here it's near spokane washington south of spokane washington and there these things can be in bloom there's this huge fields of yellow nous in certain areas and I just isolated one on an otherwise green background well if I want that background and go out of focus it has to do with the gear that I'm using the lenses the wider the angle of your lens the more difficult it is to get the background to go out of focus the longer your lenses the easier it is to get the background to go out of focus so one of the things that I do when I'm shitting is I might tryto isolate something so that it's not competing with some busy background well if I make the busy background go completely out of focus then I can have whatever is in focus be center stage and really stand out and so if I want the background to go way out of focus that's another reason why I might grab for a longer lens wide angle lenses if you actually look at him on the focus ring when you move the focus ring there's a little gauge on here of how many feet you're focused away on it and there's a point on there that looks like a little sideways eight which is the infinity symbol and once you hit that symbol it means if you're focused that faraway everything beyond that will also be in focus once you hit infinity it's like you can't focus any further everything's in focus from that point on and on a wide angle lens you'll find that that spot is not very far away from you on this particular lens it looks like it might be five feet that means with a wide angle lens if I focus on anything that's five feet away everything behind it will be in focus it'll be impossible to get the stuff out of focus if I grab a long lens this was a sixteen to thirty five if I grab here one hundred four hundred and I look at where is the infinity point it's hard to tell because the numbers are so far apart in here but it looks like it about a hundred feet so that means that these air quite different in that with this lens if anything is like five feet away from me it's going to be in focus there's no way for me to get it out of focus for the most part with this lens though it has a wider range of what can be in focus it before everything turns into focus it's only things that air let one hundred feet away if I focus that far that everything behind it be there so if I focus up close it's gonna have the background going out of focus much quicker s o that's another reason why I might choose a different lens now that's other than the normal zooming concept sure he might soon to just make something fill your frame everybody does that um so let's think about first let me just tell you the lenses that I have to say you have an idea you do not need these lenses for the longest time I used much cheaper glass than that what's here and I did find I'll show you the lenses that I have and then I'll tell you why you might head towards one kind of lens or another so first if I go to my widest lens it's on the camera at the moment it isn't justly noses a full frame camera which means the numbers I talk about are you khun take them literally when I mentioned them if you have a camera that has a smaller sensor you'll hear it being called as a crop frame sensor then you you would have to take the numbers that I mentioned and multiply them by one point six I think it is if you have what's called a psc camera which is this a smaller frame cameras on both canada nikon on and you'd have to multiply these by two if you have what's known as a four thirds camera or micro for thirds camera if you know what that means just look up if you don't know what it means just look up the brand to camera you have and put in the word crop factor and if you see a review or something that mentions crop factor in your camera you'll know you have one with a smaller sensor so the widest lens I have here is an eight to fifteen on a full frame sensor that's a ridiculously wide lens with this lens I can take this off here in fact after the lens hood is in the shot at the widest setting so I have to take it off I can come in here and if I put this on my computer screen right now I can see the entire room and on lee when I get well you guys can't even see this I might touch the screen before I can no longer see the edge of the screen I mean it is so wide that it is ridiculous um this is my white of funds this is more of a special effects linz this is a fish islands things at the edge of the frame bend when I use it and that's how I produced this particular image here this inn which was shot pointing straight up and fall color just took a few days ago and this lens is not one you're going to be using every single day because it kids dated all your images looked similar and all that kind of stuff but I find that I really like the look of the fish eye and if I use it in a appropriate way it could be nice but that's the eight to fifteen it's rare to have a zoom lens when it comes to a fish eye rare to have a zoom very expensive to have a zoom instead usually it's fixed with a zoom allows me to do is go between having one that creates a circular image like this and one that fills the entire frame like this so this would be one end of my soon range where fills the frame and this is the opposite end my zoom range where it creates a circle so that's my widest lens fast the lens I would not talk most people in getting because it's more special effects by normal wide lenses a sixteen to thirty five I should cannon to say you know I do have a nikon envy when it comes to one lens they have a lens called a fourteen to twenty four which I so wish cannon had because it would give me a wider view than this one and that would be very nice but sixteen to thirty five other lens the next one up is a twenty four to seventy the next one up is a seventy two hundred now that's set of three lenses right there is good for ninety eight point six percent of what most people shoot a wide lens a medium and a telephoto mine happen to be a sixteen to thirty five twenty four to seventy and a seventy two hundred years might vary from that mohr inexpensive lenses we'll have slightly different range on them but in general if you covered near that range that we'll do you for most things I also have here one hundred to four hundred to allow me to pull things and even closer when I'm shooting wildlife in that type of thing this is my least used lens because I don't shoot wildlife all that often and if you don't shoot wildlife all that often I would suggest you rent long glass because you khun rented many many many times before you pay for this and if it's rare for you to shoot it I rented so when I went to africa I brought this loans but I also rented a bigger one we rented a five hundred millimeter as well then I have another specialty piece of glass this is called until shift lens this not very many people would need if you showed a lot of architecture er then this is nice because it allows you to do the quo into tilting your camera up without the sides of a building getting smaller as it gets towards the top of the building it's uh interesting lens this is a seventeen till shift not very many people need that lens it's very expensive but I'm doing a project where I'm shooting two hundred gas stations which is architecture er and I like the look of a wide angle in that case and if I tell my camera a little spit the building start to distort and it's ah a nice thing to use for that particular project that wasn't doing that project a pro would known that once so that's my lens set up I do if one accessory and that is this is a one point for it's called an extender this makes these lenses longer just multiply their length by one point four so I can pull things even in even closer you can get these longer than that like a two acts kind of thing but it makes the image softer uh and so one force about all I'm willing to do so on occasion I put that onto the end of one of these two lenses ready for a question but yes so this's just a question for me I know so you don't have any straight fixed lens is prime lenses prime lenses thank you tell us about that please yeah they're different thoughts they're different ways of thinking when it comes to being a photographer and certain people will like to use prime lenses and a prime lens doesn't zoom it has one number on it you can have a thirty five millimetre we're on eighty five or something like that and if you need to fit mohr lessen the frame you need to walk closer or further away and uh those could be nice the advantage often of a prime lens which is what those air called when they only have one number on them is oftentimes they're what's known as faster glass what it means is lets more light into the camera and so your shutter speeds could be faster your viewfinder is actually brighter because more light is coming in your auto focus is faster because it's brighter frame it can pick things up better and it's easier to get the background to knock out of focus and so there are a lot of advantages of that but in the end you need to zoom with your legs on everything he and so it's just a different way of thinking it's a choice you need to make and I just happen to get into photography one when I only use zooms and I've really had primes I do have one other lens that I need to sell which is a fourteen millimeter which the prime I would like to get one probably an eighty five because I really want to get really nice out of focus backgrounds and that would allow me to do it more so so I'd consider that but it's just a personal choice and how you approach purchasing glass some people will just have prime lenses and walked a zoom it's a fine way of thinking is just happen to be not the way I was introduced teo shooting and I haven't quite gone there yet so it depends on how much of a workout you want yeah well it gives you it could be a higher quality image and it khun give you a lot of advantages but you might need more lenses to cover the range that you want and you might need to do a bit more walking so it's not a bad thing it's just a different way of approaching stuff cool and pam hawking's from new jersey one of our regulars would like to know what's your desert island lens dessert I mean if I was that kind of doesn't one lens well let's see if I'm on a desert island hole on my subject matter mainly water trees and things I would actually probably want a long lens on a dead cert island because birds might fly over I could film with afraid I can spend all day studying the reflection of water on the stuff you know absorbing it but if I had a wide lands they'd be taking the same photo all the time I wouldn't be able to do much so all the trees are in here well the entire oceans in here my desert island leads would mean I'm on a desert island and therefore I want to be able to isolate things and get a variety and I have admit I was paraphrasing her questions she asked about your favorite lens my favorite wins everybody seems tohave ah tendency of what they like what happens is as you go for wider angle lenses you're shooting has more to do about composition because you can see a lot of what's in your frame a lot of objects and you have to organize those objects to get a compelling image there's not much technically you have to know about using a wide angle lens because once you get something that's five feet in front of you it's in focus it's hard to get things out of focus so it's hard to kind of screw up the focus unless you get something really close to the camera lens you shoot a model or by model I mean a small thing not a you know person then it's easy to get things out of focus you have to get things real close though but otherwise this is more about composition this is more about isolating things and you have to be more technically proficient because it's overly easy to get things out of focus and those air not usable images and you need to make sure your exposure is even more important in that kind of stuff so here it's more technical and you're thinking on your isolating and trying to get right here it's more about composition and depends on how your brain works and what you prefer for me I love composition I used to be a graphic designer laying out a page with headlines and flow of text and all that just love dealing with all that in so my brain prefers toe have the option of composing the scene where is with these lenses I just pointed out and shoot in that I can't include all this stuff I have to have only this one little element within the scene and so it's a different mindset in my mind likes composition so I tend towards the wide angle so make any sounds thank you know and maybe one more question way have a lot of newbies out there and the big question is for complete newbies what lens would you suggest or what kind of equipment you said a couple times that you don't need a ton of stuff you don't need a ton of stuff I would think about for a complete newbie what do you want to shoot is it your kids and dance recital is it your family is it landscapes try to decide I know everybody wants to shoot everything but if you say that do you shoot industrial gear do you shoot toothpaste tubes there's something you don't shoot try to narrow what it is you want to shoot so that you can get good at whatever that is it's people of its landscapes of its whatever and that's probably going to dictate maur what you get than just generically asking people what kind of lens should you get if you end up wanting to shoot landscapes tend towards the wide angle if you're going to want to end up isolating things from their backgrounds you hate the idea of composition then start more on this end s oh it's a matter of what end is your mind set in and then look at what you can afford because these are more expensive lenses these are the ones that could go down to f two point eight which is more expensive the ones that can't go is high if you think you're going to get really serious about photography and make it a career I would tend towards the glass that goes down to half two point eight and I would buy fewer lenses and just wait save up and get the good glass if you're just a hobbyist when you take pictures of your family you're not gonna have unpublished you're not goingto print a massively huge and all that and it's less important for you to get out of focus background then get a cheaper lends the ones that are f four to five six little very it's all depends on your budget but since that's not the area where I shoot myself it's harder for me to do it cause I haven't evaluated everything that's there to be ableto give you that answer