Lucy And The Lens

Category: Cameras And Acessories

  • What Should You Photograph With A Wide-Angle Lens?

    As you may know from my previous posts or my FAQ page, I have seven lenses. Today I am going to write about the wide-angle lens and after this post throughout a long period of time, I am hoping to do a series of these for each of my lenses.

    There is no right or wrong answer as to what to use a lens for its all about your own self-expression but here I am going to tell you what I use it for.

    When I thought about buying the Sigma 10-20mm I wanted to have a better landscape lens as before this I only had the 18-55mm kit lens and the 55-200mm telephoto zoom lens which didn’t provide me with the depth of field I wanted for my landscapes.

    So, what is a wide-angle lens? A wide-angle lens is any lens that can view more than the human eye sees. Wide-angle lenses distort the subject and enhance perspective. This means whatever is in front of the frame will appear larger than anything that is further away.

    I soon realised that you can also create creative portraits with a wide-angle lens. In my opinion, by positioning yourself at a lower angle than your subject you open up your surroundings to a whole new point of view.

    In architectural shots, you want to use this lens to capture the entirety of a building so you can see all the detail and not just glimpses of it.

    In one of my university projects during my master’s I used the wide-angle lens to take images I wanted to create a perspective where I had the full person and aspects of a building behind to convey the way in which we use public spaces to this day.

    A great use I’d say is these lenses are great for events as they allow you to photograph much larger groups of people.

    The final thing I have used this lens for is when I photograph fencing charity events. The reason is that I want to get every one of the participants in the frame which I can’t do with a zoom lens maybe I’d need a zoom lens in a larger venue where I need to be further away from the action.

    I feel the wide-angle lens provides you with new perspectives that you didn’t even consider before. You can see a lot more with a wide-angle lens than a fixed perspective. Below is a gallery of some of my work using this lens:

    If you liked this post and want to read more please go through my previous posts, subscribe or check out my best of page here: Best Of .

  • Petzval 85mm Lomography Lens

    Last Thursday I went on a photo walk to Crosby and as I had already been before and I knew I was going to get exactly the same shots I took a gamble. Rather than my telephoto zoom lens I took the Petzval 85mm Lens which is a Lomography / art lens. This lens is made for portraits but I challenged myself to test out the lens with a landscape.

    This lens comes in black and brass so of course I bought the brass lens cause who doesn’t want a gold lens and I’ve nicknamed it the bond lens. I first saw the Petzval on Emily Soto’s (A Fashion Photographers) Instagram page and I fell in love with it the moment I saw it and I knew at some point I was going to have to buy it.

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    This lens comes with fixed aperture plates that you slot into it and when the light reflects of a subject or object it creates a bokeh effect. According to the lens manual a “bokeh” is the visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image, especially as rendered by a particular lens. Boke is a Japanese word meaning “blur” or haze.

    When you shoot with a wide depth of field such as an aperture of f 2.2 you get something called “A swirly bokeh effect” where the out of focus areas in your image will be encased in a blurred swirl so that you can see your subject more clearly. However today as I was shooting a landscape I used an aperture of f11 because I wanted the entire landscape to be in focus and to get a subtle bokeh effect where the light reflects of my subject.

    This lens is a reinvention of Joseph Petzvals’ 1840 lens as upon discovering that f15 was the fastest aperture that a portrait lens could manage he designed a lens that would go to an aperture of f3.6 and portraiture lenses are now based on his original invention. So that is how the Petzval 85mm lomography lens was born.

    Below are my first shots taken on the Petzval 85mm lens and there will be many more to come:

    If you enjoyed this post keep reading for more lomography and other types of photography.

  • My Camera and Lens Collection

    For this post I have decided to discuss the types ofd cameras and lenses i typically use and those I want to try and use in the future. I will be discussing my phone camera, digital SLR and my Polaroid Socialmatic Camera.

    First of all I am going to talk about my phone camera. I know this isn’t technically a camera but this is something I always have on me and there are lots of apps you can download to make your photos look more professional. At the moment my friend has inspired me to do a 366 days of positivity thing on my personal Instagram where I have to do 1 post a day. Sometimes I use quotes and screenshots but most of the time I take pictures and I admit when I first started to do the 366 days I used images straight from the mobiles camera roll. But now I have started downloading post edited images from my camera on my phone to use for my Instagram and now if I do, do mobile photography itself I have a photoshop express app for slight touch-ups. Another trusty sidekick app for me is Layout for Instagram so I can create a simple collage of multiple images for my accounts. Another Great app is Vsco cam because it has professional camera settings and it comes with its own filters and you can also buy filters for different types of photography. There is also a range of free filters you can download and add to the app.

    Typically I shoot on my  Digital Slr which is a Nikon D3200 with an AF-S Nikkor 55-200mm Telephoto Zoom Lens. Either these shoots are planned days out with Preston Photographic Society or Lancashire photo walks. I also take this camera on Holiday and pretty much everywhere I plan to go and sometimes even on spontaneous trips away. The subject of the shoot is the deciding factor for the settings I normally use.

    A studio portrait shoot is typically shot on a 70-200mm focal length depending on how much of the subject you as a photographer want your viewers to see. For this Kind of shoot the ISO should be no more than 200 because the studio lights already brighten the subject so you don’t need to add even more brightness. The shutter speed is set at 1/125 to avoid camera shake and if the subject isn’t moving and you up the shutter speed it will become blurred. Only up the shutter speed if you are doing an action shot.

    For most of my shoots I tend to use the manual setting on my camera and you can usually end up with a pretty good guide of what your aperture and shutter speed need to be and adjusting accordingly.

    Finally I am going to discuss my most recent addition to my cameras, the Polaroid Socialmatic. So for months I had been looking at Polaroid cameras on the Polaroid website and I got one a couple of months ago for my birthday. There’s a funny story behind this though. I was planning on getting a Polaroid Z3100 as I thought the Socialmatic was too expensive. However on my birthday I happened to be in Cardiff and I knew they had cameras in urban outfitters and so I went in on the off chance and there it was the exact model of the polaroid Socialmatic I’d seen on the polaroid website at a bargain price, so I was ecstatic. But I had no idea why until I got home, the camera was in Chinese and although I did Chinese Gcse years ago I just didn’t have the skills to figure it out. So I spent a couple of months with a camera I couldn’t use until earlier this month when the problem was finally solved.

    So now I’ve told you this story I am going to talk about the camera itself. The Polaroid Socialmatic is a modern version of the vintage polaroid camera in that it has its own phone network that allows you to upload pictures straight to Instagram as well as choosing and printing the shots you desire, straight from the camera.

    What’s Next?

    Now I have a Digital SLR camera and a telephoto zoom lens my plan is to keep adding lenses every Christmas and for birthdays and also saving up money to buy my own lenses.

    There are four lenses I currently have my eye on but I am waiting for a defining moment to buy one, as that is when I usually tend to indulge in material things.

    The first of these is a 50mm prime lens to give my images a wider depth of field.The second is the most expensive of these which I recently had the opportunity to test it is the Lomography 58mm f1.9 Petzval art lens which comes in brass or black and allows you to alter the distance between the lens elements. Any lens that gives your image a different perspective like the fisheye and the wide angle also fascinates me.

    I hope you enjoyed this post, stay tuned for photographic ideas, additions and events I’ve been to.