Have you ever done this? Turned your lens around to make it work like a macro lens?

I took my 50mm off and turned it around for these shots.

I’ve tried it a few times, without much success. It’s hard to hold it still while holding your lens just right, hard to hover around getting the focus right. I rarely get them sharp enough, but it’s fun to try it.

Things look very different up close.

Can you see a difference in these two photos?

Earlier today I announced on my facebook fan page I was going to shoot some photos in RAW for the first time. I’d never had Photoshop to open and edit RAW photos before, so I never tried it. Would it be as big of a deal as everyone said?

Emily gave me some great tips and reasons for using RAW, which at first glance seemed a bit too much work for me. She suggested I try the auto button to see what I should have done. Go read what she wrote for more details.

I couldn’t see much wrong with the top picture at first. After I tried clicking the auto button, I was able to see how much better the photo could be.

Will I use it every time? I’m not sure. But I am going to play with it a little more. Learning about Photoshop has been fun, but I’m glad I had the introduction to it with Elements. It’s made learning the program a lot easier.

Do you shoot in RAW?

Some of these were taken with my 50mm and some with my 85mm. I couldn’t tell much difference in how they performed in this situation.

I took this first picture Tuesday and it wasn’t long before I was completely sucked in to the bokeh behind my subject, totally losing my focus and going crazy over colored lights.

Now I make someone sit in front of the tree every day.

Here’s how to do it. Set your aperture its lowest value. Both my 50 mm and the 85 mm I used it will go to 1.8. If you have some natural light in the room to light up your subject it will really help. I opened a door, but in some photos my subject still seemed too dark.

Position your subject a few feet from the tree. Now focus on your subject and your camera will do the rest. The background will blur and those lights will sparkle.

It’s holiday magic.

You won’t want to miss it.

If you get some shots please share them with me. Either leave a comment with a link to your blog or you can post them on my fan page on Facebook. I’d love to see them.

This is something new that I only just discovered last night so I will still have to play around with it myself to figure out all the details.

It’s called picture style and it is hidden inside your menu of the SLR. It may be on some point and shoots too, just dig around inside your menu.

On my Canon XTi, I press the menu button, then the side arrow button which takes me to the 2nd menu. Scroll down to picture style. My camera offers these options: landscape, portrait, neutral, faithful and monochrome.

You can further adjust each of these pre-set styles by pressing the jump button.

The main thing I realized last night while messing around with this setting is that mine has been on landscape and never been off of it, maybe since I bought the camera. And, when I take pictures inside, I often have a problem with skin looking too saturated or too red.

Changing my style setting to neutral or faithful really helped that.

I’ll show you.

Here’s what I usually get with an indoor shot and no flash with the style set on Landscape. I often edit these photos to remove some of the redness.

But with that simple change I got these photos:

Portrait

Faithful

Neutral

Monochrome

Then I wondered if I would really notice a difference outside not using the landscape style setting.

You may be able to tell a richer, more vivid color in the landscape style.

It is more noticeable in this next photo set.

This is just one more feature you can adjust to make a difference in your photos before editing. Dig around in your menu. See if you can change the picture style too.

I warned Melissa when she asked me to guest post about lens, that truly I am a big dummy about this sort of thing. I guess since my husband and I have had a photography business she thinks I may know a thing or two.

Honestly, hubby is the technical brain all the way in this operation. He has done all the research, reading reviews, to decide what all camera and lens we needed. Then he sat down, and figured out how to use them once we get them. I am the one that comes along and says, “Show me how to use this thing?” My brain automatically shuts down if he uses too many technical words.

Lenses are different, depending you what camera you have, so the best thing to do is do research to find reviews for lenses to know what operates best for your camera.

So, this is my attempt to tell you what my favorite lenses are, and why I like them.

Emily did a great job telling you the difference between a zoom lens and a prime lens in her post past week. She said,

“~Prime lenses are also called FIXED lenses.~Zoom lenses zoom. (Told you I wasn’t an expert)
Zoom lenses allow the photographer to stand in one spot and the camera will do all the work and as long as you can focus on an object/person…it’ll get you there. Zoom lenses are fun for trips and days when you don’t know what you might be photographing.Prime lenses make the photographer move because the lens is fixed at one focal length on your camera. The photographer (you) MUST move and compose your shot in your viewfinder. It’s work ladies. It’s not for the lazy, but for portraits they’re amazingly clear so I try and only use a fixed lens when I’m taking portraits.”

She is exactly right. When we first got our DSLR camera, it was a Canon 10D, (they no longer make these) and it came with a camera kit. These were zoom lenses. I learned to use them and thought I was in business. Then my hubby introduced me to a Prime lens. I complained, and protested, not wanting to have to “move” to take a picture. It totally threw off my brain from my previous way of thinking.

Over time though, I began to LOVE using our Prime lens. Indeed, they take a great picture. My favorite way to take a photo is with no flash. You just can’t do that with a zoom lens unless you have perfect light. I also found that when you are having a large print made of your photo, they were much clearer than the photos taken with a zoom lens. We purchased a few more expensive zoom lenses, and still found we liked the performance of the prime lenses much better. So, that is the type of lens I have been using about 90% of the time for the past 3 years.

Recently, we have decided to close our business, and have sold most of our equipment. I had been using a Canon 5D, but since that was our most expensive camera, and we could get the most money back out of it, we sold it. I now use a 40D, which is also a great camera, just not the one I am used to. Because of this, I have been in a photography funk, and haven’t taken the time to play around with it. Lately, I have been using our old zoom lens and the on-camera flash, and am remembering how much easier a zoom lens can be when I am with my kiddos.

To demonstrate what I am talking about, I took photos of my son with different lenses. All of these were on the P setting of my camera (meaning it is mostly automatic settings, but it allows me to change my film speed, or ISO) I purposely did not edit these photos, because I wanted you to see the out of the camera difference with the lens. I shot all these images except the last one with an ISO of 800 with no other light on in the room, only the natural light coming in from the window.

Photo 1 was taken with a Canon 28 mm 1. 8 lens. Notice there is just a little blurring of the background. This lens lets in a lot of light, so this is good in low light settings and no flash.

Photo 2 was taken with a 50 mm 1.8. Notice there is more blur to the background, pulling your eye more to the subject. This lens to me is the best buy for your money. It operates great for a portrait lens, and won’t break the bank.

This photo was taken with the Canon 85mm 1.8. I forgot to mention that I sat in the same spot for all the photos I took, but I did have to lean back to get this much in the frame. This lens has always been my very favorite lens with my photography. It blurs the background great, and gives a lot of depth to your image.

Photo 4 was taken with a Sigma zoom 18-50 mm lens. Do you see the difference? I couldn’t get a clear picture at all with this lens without the flash. This was with it zoomed to 50mm.

This one was taken at the 18mm with the same lens…meaning it was not zoomed at all. Still blurry. Also, no background blur.

Using the same Sigma zoom lens, I turned the ISO to 4oo and turned on the flash, and this one did much better, but has a whole different look from the prime lens with no flash.

One more lens I want to tell you about is a Sigma 70-300mm zoom lens that has a macro feature on it.

When we first got our camera, this lens came with the camera kit. My husband had gotten these roses for me, and he was playing around with the Macro feature on the camera. He used available light from a window, but he put the camera on a tripod, allowing the shutter to be able to remain open longer, but the photo not be blurry b/c the camera was perfectly still on the tripod.

These 2 flower photos are my all-time favorite photos, and they were both taken with this lens, but using a tripod.

This lens would not do good indoors without a flash, at all, unless you did have a tripod. But…I love it for outdoors, capturing my kids smiling, playing, with water on their face? One of my favorites that I took of my daughter was when she was playing in the pool, when she was 2, and you can see the water drops on her face…unfortuately, it would take me an hour to find that photo for you. I recently pulled this lens back out, and took it to our downtown water park to play around with it. It allows me to stay really far back and not get wet, but capture all of what is going on with them.

……….

Thanks Maury! This is going to be so helpful when I go to purchase my next lens. You can check out Maury’s blog at www.mdd5.blogspot.com