Lucy And The Lens

Tag: #sigma10/20mm

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:
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March 12, 2020
Crystal Ball Photography
At the beginning of the year, I set myself 30 photography related goals. Currently, I have started 11 of them, and today I am going to talk about goal number 24 which was to begin using props within my photography.

My First prop of 2018 is a Crystal Ball because this is something I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Crystal ball photography is a type of photography that distorts your image, simularly to a fisheye lens except your subject will appear upside down inside the ball, which is the main reason it appeals to me. I also started following the #crystalballphotography on Instagram to find inspiration.

The first time I used it was sometime in mid-February when it snowed overnight, so I went into my garden the next morning and experimented with my Nikon D3200, my iPhone 8+, and my crystal ball.

I decided my sigma 10-20mm (wide angle lens) was the best one to use for this experiment, so I placed my crystal ball on my garden wall making sure I had foliage behind and shot at ISO 100 but kept varying the aperture and shutter speed to achieve a variety of different photos. I decided that the crystal ball in the snow tended to look better in black and white, so I adjusted this in the post-processing in Lightroom. I did this by taking down the contrasts and highlights and upping the shadows and exposure and then converting my image to black and white.

I also used portrait mode on my iPhone 8+ to test a variety of different types of lighting my crystal ball and edited these in photoshop express. My favourite set-up in portrait mode is the stage lighting in black and white as I felt it made the snow stand out.

The Second time with my Crystal Ball I went to Beacon Fell with a friend who held the crystal ball for me while I photographed some sunsets. Anyone who knows me knows that this is a type of shot I thoroughly enjoy taking so I couldn’t wait to try a new approach.

Finally the third time I took my crystal ball out it was also snowing except this time I went to Avenham Park using the landscape as my backdrop.

Here is a gallery of my Crystal Ball photos:

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March 26, 2018