Lucy And The Lens

Category: Opinions

  • 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 .

  • Owls At Waterstones Preston

    On the 31/07/2016 I went to Waterstones to pick up my pre-order of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Now I like to go to Waterstones quite often for a browse and usually never leave the store without three books and I also order books on Amazon. For Harry Potter and the Cursed Child I made the decision to pre-order my book and pick it up from Waterstones.

    A few months later I am really glad I chose to do this because I got to combine my love of reading with photography yet again as Waterstones had real owls in the store courtesy of Barn Owl Bill. I was really excited about this because I love owls and I have never had the pleasure of photographing them before. The best thing about photographing owls is that you don’t have to tell them to pose, they just do it anyway.

    My Favourite shot taken on my Nikon D3200 with my Telephoto Zoom Lens was of the beautiful owl who lost one of its eyes when it was run over by a car as for me beauty appears in the unlikeliest of places, the owl did not need two eyes to be beautiful, it just was. The detail on its feathers was striking.

    But for me the event was not complete without one more thing. I couldn’t go and photograph the owls without holding one and the wonderful event organisers kindly captured a shot for me.

    Below are my photographs from the event:

  • Terns at Preston Docks

    So the most recent photo walk I went on with Preston Photographic Society was at Preston Docks shooting Terns and for me it was completely out of my comfort zone. Don’t get my wrong I’m a photographer but bird photography doesn’t really appeal to me, it’s unplanned as there is no control as to when the birds are going to do something like fly or have a brawl. So it involves sitting somewhere patiently waiting for something to happen and for me this is chaos, as I like to plan things.

    For example landscapes are always going to be where you want them to be, you will often find exciting people wandering round the streets and for me portraiture is the most exciting of all. The Reason for this is with studio work you can decide on props beforehand and people are always exciting because every person expresses himself or herself in a different way and you can see that through photography.

    This is why for me I don’t really understand birds, but I’m willing to try and I do like looking for unpredictable shots but if I’m going to try bird photography again I think I will try posing birds like owls or parrots.

    But saying that I somehow managed to get some shots of the Kestrels I’m happy with by setting my ISO really high and my shutter speed to 1/1000 as the higher the shutter speed the more motion you manage to capture.

    And I will say this time and time again never be afraid to step outside your comfort zone with photography because you might surprise yourself and although I couldn’t sit and shoot birds for hours the results actually surprised me.

    Below is a selection of the Tern shots I took on the evening: