Canon 50mm f/1.4 Article

I just finished writing another article for my personal website. In this case, I wrote a review of the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 lens. You can read it here: Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens review.

I do enjoy reviewing and writing about equipment, and I've received a few kudos for posting my reviews. Often when I'm shooting, I'll consider whether a particular shot will make a good example for review article. For my less frequently used lenses, I have to dig back through an archive of images to find example photographs. Fortunately, the Adobe Lightroom program allows me to filter the images by the specific lenses that were used to produce them. Lightroom has made it much easier to organize and find my photos. It's not only great for reviews, with the judicious use of keywords, it allows me to find almost any image in my extensive library in a very short amount of time.

The photo to the left is an example photo from the 50 f/1.4 and shows this lenses great low-light capability. The image was taken completely by the available light of a little bar in St. Helens, Oregon.

New Article: Composition - Leading Lines, Diagonals and Curves

I just finished writing a new composition lesson on the use of Leading Lines, Diagonals and Curves. The article can be found here on my personal website. It's the 4th in a series of articles or lessons about basic photographic composition.

The lesson discusses the use of lines to add a sense of movement to your images and to guide the eye to various elements within the photograph. It also discusses the use of other geometric entities such as triangles, arcs and curves and elements that can be used within an image to provide spatial separation, to frame and to direct the viewer's eye. I hope it's useful to anyone who has the interest and the time to read it. As always, feedback is welcome.

New Photography Article

Just added a new article about the Columbia River Gorge, one of my favorite places to visit for photography. You can read it here.

You can read about it here.

Feedback is always welcome.

Not much else is happening photographically recently. I did help a friend last night with the flooring in the studio he's putting together over his garage. He has a great space for it, and I've got some gear he can use once the space it all put together. It will be fun working with him and show him how to set up and use studio strobes once we get everything going.

I also ordered a couple of new backdrops from B&H photo. These will come in useful when shooting in limited space as they are the Botero Collapsible units. I'm hoping they'll be just the right size for location shooting and for a smaller studio space.

I had been saving for a couple of new lenses, but unfortunately, the furnace went out on Tuesday, and had to be replaced today to the tune of a little over $2400. That, along with the new garage door openers and the repairs my truck is going to need, will set back my plans for a while. Fortunately, the money for the repairs is available, but it would sure have been nice to hang on to it for a while longer.

I'm getting a bit of the winter photographic blues, so I've been trying to work around them by writing more articles for my website. That's been fun and interesting and it allows me to put my photos to good use by helping others, I hope, learn more about photography, equipment and places to shoot. Still, I'd rather be shooting. Having a read day job puts a crimp in that during the wintertime, since by the time I get home, it's already too dark for outdoor shooting and I don't have any new models to work with right now. But, soon, I hope, there will be more shooting for fun and profit.

Writing

I enjoy writing. I'm not sure whether that's because I enjoy the process of communicating my thoughts and ideas, or whether it's simply that I enjoy the process of crafting the words, sentences and paragraphs together into coherent wholes that convey those thoughts and ideas. I also enjoy photography, and therefore when I write, I generally write about my photographs, about my cameras, lenses and other equipment or about the people, places and things that I have photographed in the past or want to photograph in the future.

Lately, I've been writing a series of articles for my personal webite. A list of those articles can be found here: Writings and Articles. I'm concentrating on lens reviews right now, and it has been great fun to go back through my extensive archive of photos to find images that best exemplify the characteristics of a particular lens. The image to the right, for example, is used in an article about the Canon 28-70 f/2.8 EF L lens, which has been my workhorse lens for over 5 years. I have an entire list of additional articles on equipment that I'm slowly, but surely completing, and I'm always looking for new ideas for articles.

This image is taken from my review of the Canon 100-400 f/4.5-5.6 EF L IS lens. The image shows just how sharp this long zoom can be even when it is wide open (maximum aperture) and at its longest focal length. The image also shows that the lens has good bokeh (the quality of the background blur) and color saturation.

The image itself was taken at a mid-summer celebration party in 2006. Although the party had a pagan theme, there were guests from all religious stripes in attendance, and the event included costumes, body painting, fire dancing and excellent food and drink (very important for any party). It was really a fun photographic experience, and I enjoyed shooting the event for the group and sharing the images afterwards, and I had no idea at the time that I would be writing an article about both of the lenses I was using at the event.

So, I look forward to writing the articles, and I hope that those that stumble across my personal website find them useful and informative. During the holiday break, I expect that I will be able to finish at least two or three more of the equipment articles and at begin writing a new article about photographic lighting tips and techniques.