Archive for September, 2007

A friend of mine told me the other day that he is planning to buy his first DSLR and asked me about focal lengths and F values of lenses. I told him what I think about a starter kit and I recommended a way to follow, but a different one that I went through.
And I recommended that because I have done wrong.

When I entered the DSLR world I bought a Nikon D80 with a 18-135mm kit lens.

I am still really happy with the camera body. As learning more and more I am happy with not being forced to use any of the programmed modes. I can use aperture priority – that I use most of the time – and shutter speed priority as well. Automatic ISO setting can be switched off – you don’t want to leave it on ’cause that can result horrible pictures in weakly lit situations. It can create raw image files enabling you to adjust things like white balance on your PC, or even play around with High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography starting from a single raw file. Can be used in manual focus mode which helps for example when shooting through glass or wire fence. And it can control remote speedlights even in TTL mode without any additional hardware.

However I think the lens was not a good choice considering that I really wanted (and still want) to learn photography.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no complaints about the quality of the lens. I still think that it’s good value for money, the pictures I made with it are quite sharp and have never had a bad thought about the plastic mount ring. (It’s chromatic aberration and vignetting can be somewhat handled by image processing software.)
However the issue with the lens is that it’s versatile - even too versatile if I can say that. With the range of zoom it has it practically hides the important differences of the wide angle, normal and telephoto focal lengths. You simply don’t have to think about that and as a result you don’t know how close or far you should be from your subject matter or what angle of view will be seen at certain focal lengths. You zoom in and out without thinking. 

My suggestion for someone who is eager to learn photography would be this kit:

• a DSLR with the mentioned functionality and freedom (currently D80 in the Nikon world)
• an auto-focus fix 50mm F1.8 normal lens that can be used in different lighting situations, gives you the experience of quality images – like amazing silky smooth background at wide open aperture settings for portraiture, and real value for price
• and a speedlight capable of TTL and remotely controllable by your camera like the Nikon SB-600
• slow down when purchasing your gear even if you have the money   

Just fallen in love with digital photography, DSLR, remotely controlled speedlights, silk smooth background for portraits, mindbogglingly minor details of little creatures, saturated colours and HDR and it happened all of a sudden that I saw a few photos made with a medium format film camera and scanned after that.
And those photos are great in a way that I think my photos made with my Nikon D80 will never be.
And I am scared of medium format, scared because medium format equipment is way more expensive than that I can afford.

When talking about about medium format photography the first thing that is usually mentioned is its resolution. Medium format is big. Bigger even than full frame. An SLR has a 35mm wide film- and a fullframe DSLR has a the same sized sensor – while the medium format starts at 60mm. A popular size in this world is the 6 cm x 4.5 cm which is often mentioned as 645 in the model name of cameras. Some digital backs result 39 megapixel images. 39 megapixel, can you imagine that?

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There is a place in Austria where you can observe Japanese Macaques leading their lives in a free-roaming environment. The place is called Monkey Mountain in Landskron Affenberg.
I have been there with my family during our vacation. We had to go there twice because the weather was so rainy for the first time that I was scared to take my precious camera with me.

I tried to capture portraits of those very human creatures. I enjoyed just standing there and watching them just like watching children playing.

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