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Posts Tagged ‘lens’

Photography, Portrait, Technology | 0 comment

Leaf Shutter Lenses Part 1 – Tech Thursday

ballroom dance photography - ©TimeLine Media

The wintry weather finally broke for a little bit last week! I finally had a good chance to test one of the best features of the Fuji X100s camera – the leaf shutter lens. Most cameras produced today have focal plane shutters which have a curtain that opens and closes in front of the sensor. With a leaf shutter lens, there are blades built into the lens itself that opens and closes as the shutter opens and closes in the camera. As you press the shutter button on the camera, there is no difference in the operation between these two types of lenses. Where the big difference comes is in the fastest flash sync speed that is possible when using a leaf shutter lens. This opens up a lot of creative possibilities!

Camera Tech

On typical DSLRs, between 1/160th to 1/250th of a second is the fastest shutter speeds that you can use if you want the flash to fully expose the frame. If you use a strobe with a DSLR and have your shutter speed set higher (ie 1/500th second or higher) you will start to get a large black band on your photo where the curtain is still covering a part of the sensor since the shutter speed is too high. This is not a limitation for leaf shutter lenses such as the one in the Fuji X100s. When shooting indoors, like ballroom dance competitions, this limitation is not a problem as 1/250th second is plenty fast to control the light coming into the camera.

ballroom dance photography - ©TimeLine Media
ballroom dance photography – ©TimeLine Media

The limitation of 1/250th really impacts outdoor shoots. If you want to use a flash, and you have to keep your shutter speed at 1/250th or slower, that means you need to close down your aperture – f/8 or higher depending on how bright the sun is outside. In viewing these photos, everything including your background will be in focus making it difficult to separate your subject from the background. One solution is to not use a flash since you have plenty of light, but now all the tones in the scene are very similar making the image flat, and not as dynamic. Next week, I’ll show you how the leaf shutter lens really changes this photo with the change of a few settings in the same scene.

Flat outdoor portrait without fill flash - ©TimeLine Media
Flat outdoor portrait without fill flash – ©TimeLine Media

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Personal, Photography, Portrait | 0 comment

June 21

I am gearing up to photograph another ballroom dance event tomorrow. In looking at my gadgets and workspace, I see a lot of influence from my father. I shoot Nikon cameras. My first SLR photos were taken with his Nikon F2 and Nikkor lenses. I recently found two silver (strange since they are usually gold-colored) boxes with some fast glass. Amazingly, they work with the newest digital cameras from Nikon, so I use them for personal shoots – just for fun.

Photography Influence

Tatays-fast-glass-7 remembering him this June 21

For video these manual focus lenses have especially solid focusing rings for using with moving images. Today, I was looking around my old photos, and saw a snap shot I took of my dad’s work space some time ago. He was an architect that worked at home much of the time I was growing up. He looked after me while doing his projects for clients. There are some stark differences with my work area now – no computer, printer, actually no major technological electronic appliance to be seen in the photo! He has many source books of construction codes and supplies. Additionally he has an old hard hat he used when visiting construction sites.

Architect Work Area

Tatays-office-summer-1998-0002 remembering him this June 21

Of course, he has the tools of the trade he used to design buildings out of blank sheets of paper. Pencils, pens, rulers, green templates for shapes – from these he designed the house that I lived in since high school before leaving for college.   I definitely did not appreciate what these designers like him do, I just admired the way that he could see perspectives, and put them on paper. He could have an idea in his head, and put them to paper. As an exercise he would quiz me on differentiating between models of planes as they came in for landings. He would point out differences between 737’s, MD-80’s, or Fokker-100’s.

If not at the airport, he would examine shoes at a store and tell me why he thought one design was better than the next (he was Filipino after all). And if he was dancing, he would show me and my mom why the Cha Cha was the best dance – the best songs on an album had a Cha Cha beat, and there are lots of opportunities for moves to do on the floor. Geez, I am my father’s son.

Tatay-at-UR-0001 remembering him this June 21

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com 703-864-8208

Photography, Technology | 0 comment

Tech Thursday – Fisheye Lens

©TimeLine Media - Fisheye Jefferson Memorial Corrected

For today’s Tech Thursday post, I wanted to go to the opposite side of the focal length scale. Last time, I posted about the 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. This is by far the longest lens I use on a regular basis. One of the widest lenses that I have is the 16mm Fisheye lens from Nikon. This is undoubtedly an extremely wide-angle lens. In sum, it allows for a complete 180-degree field of view in the camera frame. This is one piece of camera gear that is overused by photographers when they first get their hands on it. You definitely need to get this out of your system with interiors and landscape images. Here is an example of a shot with the Fisheye lens from the balcony of a church overlooking a wedding ceremony.

Wedding Photography

©TimeLine Media - Fisheye wedding ceremony
©TimeLine Media – Fisheye wedding ceremony

These make nice scene setting images for wedding albums. These are suited for photos where people faces are not prominent. The bowing of the image at the sides do not make this a good portrait lens. No one likes to be the curved/distorted one at the edge of a fisheye image! The wide field of view allows you to put lots of elements into a frame without resorting to a lot of post-production work to combine images. Here is another wedding image to put the cake in it’s complete setting.

©TimeLine Media - Fisheye wedding cake
©TimeLine Media – Fisheye wedding cake

The characteristic fisheye distortion is clearly seen in the columns. You will notice that the distortion is not as bad through the center of the picture. Place your subject as close to the middle of the frame to reduce the effect of the lens on your subject. This makes it challenging to keep the rule-of-thirds in the frame, but that is normal with these extreme lenses. If you do not want to have the curvature in the image, this can be corrected easily with software. In Adobe Lightroom 4, there is a lens correction feature that will fix the distortion in the image with a few clicks. I took a photo of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC and corrected it Lightroom. Here are both the corrected and uncorrected versions of the photo:

Washington, DC

©TimeLine Media - Fisheye Jefferson Memorial Uncorrected
©TimeLine Media – Fisheye Jefferson Memorial Uncorrected
©TimeLine Media - Fisheye Jefferson Memorial Corrected
©TimeLine Media – Fisheye Jefferson Memorial Corrected

Now the angles have all been straightened, and the photo looks more “normal”. But you have the added benefit of having more of the area in the photo than is possible with a straight or rectilinear lens. Give these lenses a try next time you are thinking of visiting somewhere large expanses of views, or enourmous ceiling heights. They can be a lot of fun!

©TimeLine Media - example Fisheye photo
©TimeLine Media – example Fisheye photo

TimeLine Media – www-timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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