Challenge Yourself

When it comes to photography, it’s always a good idea to challenge yourself to do something new and different, just to keep yourself fresh as an artist.

I personally, and many other photographers will agree, that one of the best ways to challenge yourself is to shoot with only one lens. I love to do these kinds of challenges myself. I went to a car show last Sunday called Wish Upon a Car, which was raising money for the Make a Wish Foundation of Georgia.

Shot with my Canon EOS 5D Classic with the EF 40mm STM F/2.8

For this car show, I challenged myself by shooting the car show with my Canon EF 40mm STM F/2.8 pancake lens. I love this little lens as it has the new STM or Stepper Motor auto-focus system, which is very quiet and the lens itself is very small and lightweight.

I know you probably have a telephoto lens or two as I do, but when you take your telephoto lens with you all the time, you tend to get lazy and hang back and shoot everything from a distance, instead of getting up close and personal with your subject. Plus, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, even though zoom lens technology has come a long way, primes still give you superior image and detail quality, especially when you are up close and personal.

Canon EOS 5D Classic with EF 40mm STM F/2.8

So, your challenge for the month of October, go out and shoot something with nothing more than one of your prime lenses and get up close and personal, as long as you can do it without endangering yourself or anyone else of course.

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Using Aperture for Your Sharpest Images

An item that new students that are also new to photography get confused on is how to get the sharpest images. Often times new students believe that getting the widest aperture lens possible if they can afford it will give them the sharpest images, this is NOT true.

If you ask any of your professors or any other professional photographer, they will tell you that your sharpest images happen around 2 stops below your widest aperture. As an example, I have the Canon EF 50mm F/1.4 USM lens, but I never shoot this lens at F/1.4 as it performs much better sharpness-wise at around F/2.8 on a full frame camera or F/2 on a 1.6x crop body.

Shot on EOS 5D Classic with EF 50mm F/1.4 @ F/1.4

When you shoot with this lens wide open you get very strong halation aka dreamy look with some Chromatic Aberration in your images as well. After the dreamy look diminishes at F/2-F/2.8 you get very strong colors and contrast, which in turn will make your images really “pop”. When using a really wide lens, you don’t want your aperture smaller than F/8 because then diffraction starts to soften them again.

This sharpness is how things apply to prime lenses, which have extremely wide apertures. When dealing with zoom lens, it works a little different, on a zoom lens, the optimum sharpness range might be smaller but they are generally sharpest at their widest apertures of F/3.5-F/5.6 or even F/6.3. Now with a zoom lens as I mentioned the sharpness range is usually smaller but you can generally count on sharp images from the starting aperture to around F/8 or maybe F/10, anything past that and again you get diffraction again.

Shot on EOS 5D Classic with EF 50mm F/1.4 @ F/2.8 notice even the bokeh is better

 Now that you are more informed about using aperture to get sharp images, get out there and make some great ones!

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