Archive for the ‘photography’ Category
Monday, January 25th 2010
Just before I was about to sell my old lens, I searched the web for good ways of cleaning the outsides of a lens.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with the weird white stuff that gets stuck between the little grooves on your zoom and focus rings. I guess it’s a mix of salt, grease and dead skin cells. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably haven’t had your DSLR for a full year.
This is what it looks like:
Anyway, the method that I found is really simple. (And cheap!)
Just find an old toothbrush and fill a cup with warm water. Dip the toothbrush in the water and flick it hard a few times to get most of the water out of it again.
Then you simply brush the mucky areas. Just make sure the toothbrush isn’t leaving pools of water all over your lens – it’ll get into the joins.
Rinse the toothbrush if it gets too dry.
If you don’t drop your lens in the cup of water, you should end up with a lens looking close to new!
(BTW, this is not the lens I sold. The toothbrush method worked so well I went ahead and cleaned all my lenses.)
Posted in camera, lenses, photography, tips | No Comments »
Friday, January 22nd 2010
After having bought my second hand EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 I sold my Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5. But before I sent it off to the buyer, I took some test shots for a little comparison of the two lenses.
I set my camera up on my tripod and took shots of our bookcases from roughly 2.5 meters away, at a right angle. I took photos at 17mm, 35mm and 55mm with both lenses, and at each focal length I took photos at f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6 and f/8.0. (Obviously, the Sigma doesn’t do f/2.8 at 35mm and 55mm.)
One thing I did notice fairly soon was that the Sigma’s autofocus was much less reliable than the Canon’s. For some of the shots I ended up having to manually hunt for the optimum focus distance. The Canon got it right every time.
From each test shot I have cropped out sections from the centre, mid and edge areas. All in all, 66 squares of 300×300 pixels, which I have ordered in (hopefully) pretty tables below.
As you can see in the overview photos, the sections are taken from different places for the different focal lenghts. (To use the areas of the bookcases with most detail in them.)
I’ve put my own conclusion in words at the end, after all the tables.
| 17mm – Centre |
| Aperture |
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 |
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS |
| f/2.8 |
 |
 |
| f/4.0 |
 |
 |
| f/5.6 |
 |
 |
| f/8.0 |
 |
 |
| 17mm – Mid |
| Aperture |
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 |
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS |
| f/2.8 |
 |
 |
| f/4.0 |
 |
 |
| f/5.6 |
 |
 |
| f/8.0 |
 |
 |
| 17mm – Edge |
| Aperture |
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 |
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS |
| f/2.8 |
 |
 |
| f/4.0 |
 |
 |
| f/5.6 |
 |
 |
| f/8.0 |
 |
 |
| 35mm – Centre |
| Aperture |
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 |
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS |
| f/2.8 |
|
 |
| f/4.0 |
 |
 |
| f/5.6 |
 |
 |
| f/8.0 |
 |
 |
| 35mm – Mid |
| Aperture |
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 |
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS |
| f/2.8 |
|
 |
| f/4.0 |
 |
 |
| f/5.6 |
 |
 |
| f/8.0 |
 |
 |
| 35mm – Edge |
| Aperture |
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 |
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS |
| f/2.8 |
|
 |
| f/4.0 |
 |
 |
| f/5.6 |
 |
 |
| f/8.0 |
 |
 |
| 55mm – Centre |
| Aperture |
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 |
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS |
| f/2.8 |
|
 |
| f/4.0 |
 |
 |
| f/5.6 |
 |
 |
| f/8.0 |
 |
 |
| 55mm – Mid |
| Aperture |
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 |
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS |
| f/2.8 |
|
 |
| f/4.0 |
 |
 |
| f/5.6 |
 |
 |
| f/8.0 |
 |
 |
| 55mm – Edge |
| Aperture |
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 |
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS |
| f/2.8 |
|
 |
| f/4.0 |
 |
 |
| f/5.6 |
 |
 |
| f/8.0 |
 |
 |
Conclusions
On the whole, in almost all of the little squares, the Canon is running circles round the Sigma. No pun intended actually.
Surprisingly though, the Sigma looks sharper than the Canon in the centre and mid areas of the frame when using f/2.8 at 17mm. The Canon seems to suffer from some kind of fringing here. (At the edges though, the Canon is better.)
To summarize, it was much as I had hoped and expected. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed with the Canon’s performance at 17mm. At the same time I don’t think that fringing will be very visible with most subjects. It would take a lot of fringing to out-weigh the benefits of having image stabilization.
Posted in Sigma, canon, lenses, photography | No Comments »
Friday, January 15th 2010
Various photos from the Christmas holidays. We really have had beautiful winter weather here in Sweden. Several weeks of temperatures between -10 and -20 degrees C.
Posted in Eskilstuna, Uppsala, photography | No Comments »
Friday, January 15th 2010
The last few weeks have been very cold here in Sweden. But the last few days in particular have offered some very pretty frost.
Even though the temperature was -10 C, we had mist. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it definitely looked like mist or fog. The damp but cold air covered everything in a thick layer of frost.
So, a perfect opportunity for a photo walk bike ride through Eskilstuna with my new lens.
Posted in 17-55mm IS, Eskilstuna, photography | No Comments »
Thursday, January 14th 2010
I haven’t done any serious sharpness testing of this lens yet, but so far I’m really liking it. The f/2.8 aperture through the zoom range, the quiet auto focus and the image stabilization are all fantastic.
Or what about this shot through our bedroom window? 17mm, which normally needs 1/30th of a second to be sharp hand-held. Here I got away with 1/3rd of a second, leaning my hand against the window frame.
That one third of a second feels like an eternity when you’re holding the camera and hear the click … … click.
BTW, if you can explain why the frost is on only one side of the tree branches I’d be very grateful. (It is frost, not snow. And the wind these last few days has been basically non-existant.)
I was also able to shoot a perfectly sharp photo of my wife pulling a silly face in our bedroom, lit by nothing but her computer screen and a 40 Watt light-bulb. Admittedly at ISO 800, but it would have had to be ISO 6400 with my old lens. And my camera only goes to 3200 …
Summary: Looking forward to using this lens for a long time to come!
Posted in 17-55mm IS, canon, lenses, photography | 4 Comments »
Sunday, January 10th 2010
I’ve been saving up for a while, and with some money I was given for Xmas I had enough to get a second hand Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM.
It took many late nights of on-line research to decide which lens would be the best choice. I’ve been considering the Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 VC (Vibration Compensation) and the Sigma 17-70 f/2.8-4.0 OS (Optical Stabilization). But in the end I decided to hunt down a second hand Canon 17-55mm f/2.8.
Initial reviews of the two other lenses have been so-so. And the Canon has both the constant maximum aperture of the Tamron and the quiet auto-focus of the Sigma.
I’ve managed to get my hands on a two year old copy of the EF-S 17-55mm which doesn’t seem to have been used very much. It really is in perfect condition, and I only paid two thirds of the price of a new one.
I’ll probably post a little comparison between the EF-S 17-55mm and my current standard zoom, the Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5. If nothing else to cure my own curiosity.
By the way, if you live in Sweden and want to buy my Sigma, I’m selling it here.
As always in camera-land, one piece of new equipment will lead to another.
The EF-S is good in many ways, but it definitely isn’t compact. This means that I can’t really fit all my lenses in my current camera bag and the guy who sold me the 17-55 showed me his beautiful Lowepro Slingshot 350 AW. Beautiful as in extremely well designed.
The Lowepro 350 has a smaller sibling, the 300 (which lacks a laptop compartment) which will most likely be the subject for my next saving-up project.
Posted in Sigma, canon, lenses, photography | No Comments »
Thursday, December 3rd 2009
I’ve been waiting quite a while for a foggy morning to visit S:t Eskils kyrkogård (churchyard) with my camera. Today wasn’t foggy, but it was frosty, so I gave it a go.
When I got there I had trouble seeing stuff and was a bit disappointed, but after a while I got going.
Posted in Eskilstuna, photography | No Comments »
Saturday, November 7th 2009
I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. But for some reason I’ve started dreaming of a nice new wide-screen display for our computer.
I have no reason to dream of a new screen. We have a 17 inch, 1280×1024 Acer that works perfectly. It swivels, tilts and does all kinds of tricks. Yet I can’t get this thing out of my head:
It is the NEC EA231WMi.
It is 23 inches across. It shows 1920×1080 pixels. It can be raised or lowered, turned, or pivoted for reading long documents.
But most importantly, the panel in this screen is an IPS panel. That means the picture is much more like what you got on an old fat-screen.
Most flat-screens can’t actually show all the 16.7 million colours that an old fat-screen can. The fact that nearly all flat-screens only have 6 bit colour depth for red, green and blue is a well-kept secret.
Now it couldn’t have been a well-kept secret if 6-bits meant horrible colour. It doesn’t. But it can mean that you get slight banding in gradients which should really be perfectly smooth. Have a look at the background on my website to see what I mean.
The NEC EA231WMi can show all those colours. And it is much less sensitive to viewing angle than most other screens.
Those things are great for a photo-geek like myself. Especially the bit about viewing angles, since it means that I don’t risk making photos too light or too dark because I happened to have the screen tilted slightly wrong when I made the adjustments.
The fact that the screen is really wide is nice for using Lightroom, which has panels down both sides and the photo in the middle. On a wide-screen the photo area becomes much larger.
Obviously it can show full 1080p HD video too. Such as the upcoming season of Top Gear. (Sunday 15th!)
The best thing is the price of this thing. Around $380, or SEK 3600, which is about half as much as most comparable screens. Still, I’ll have to ask for contributions for Xmas. The money I’ve saved up for unnecessary fun stuff isn’t quite enough yet.
Posted in NEC EA231WMi, new computer, photography, screen | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, November 4th 2009
Posted in Eskilstuna, photography | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 4th 2009
I liked how this one turned out. Shot with my 50 mm lens at f/1.8. I have desaturated it, added some split toning and a vignette. I have some more on Flickr.
Posted in Eskilstuna, photography | No Comments »
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