THE BEST LONG LENS TECHNIQUE

hey everybody and welcome back to another video do you find that your photos from long lenses aren't as sharp as you'd like would you like to have those crisp shots that say quality from your long focal length or telephoto lenses I've taken over a million shots with these two lenses in the last eight years and in this video I'm going to share my best techniques to squeeze every ounce of sharpness out of your long focal lengths you'll want to stay for my bonus tip where I'll show you my secret trick to squeeze the last extra bit of sharpness like in this photo and I warn you it's gonna hurt my name is Simone and I'm a professional nature and wildlife photographer living in Eastern Canada I make weekly videos giving you photo tips or taking you behind the scenes for wildlife and nature photography subscribe if you want to see more [Music] shut your mouth [Music] sometimes you first off a warning there are people pretending to be me using my photo and in the comments below offering you prizes these are scammers stay away from them now let's just get something out of the way there are indeed lenses that are sharper than others and also not every genre of Photography needs tack sharp photos but let's face it getting the maximum performance out of your lenses is an aspiration that many have and buying bigger and sharper lenses is something many people would rather avoid so in this video we're going to focus on getting the sharpest photos out of your current lens lineup now how along a lens is a long lens there's no magic number that any lens that has a lens foot to it to attach to a tripod would fit this definition now why is this video about getting sharp photos out of long lenses that's because longer focal lengths have a bad way of magnifying our shooting errors and affecting image sharpness why is that one reason is because movement of the camera of only small proportions just get magnified when you have longer focal lengths here here's an example here's my 500 millimeter lens and a 1.4 teleconverter so 700 millimeters handheld now here's my 100 to 400 at 100 millimeters of the same scene as you can see the longer focal length magnifies any movement so what's going on with longer lenses that impacts the sharpness of photos there are a number of things here that need our attention the first of which is around movement one is camera and lens movement one is subject movement and one is shutter vibration let's start off with lens and camera movement the issue here is that even for a static Target unless you're on a tripod you need a certain minimum shutter speed to get sharp photos as even the best handheld technique still allows for camera movement given that longer focal lengths makes this problem worse the solution to this needs to take this into consideration the solution here is to have a minimum shutter speed at all times and one that takes into account the focal length an easy technique to calculate this is to use the fraction of 1 over your focal length to determine your minimum shutter speed so a 200 millimeter lens use one over 200 or 1 200th second shutter speed for static targets a 500 millimeter lens one five hundredth of a second we also need to adjust this for the crop factor of your camera this is because smaller sensors give an effective magnification to your image if you shoot at crop or aps-c sensor multiply your needed shutter speed by the crop factor so 1 200th of a second times 1.5 equals 1 300th of a second or the nearest 1 320th on Canon cameras use 1.6 for a micro four thirds camera used two times or one four hundredth if you have sensor stabilization this is where it will come in handy it allows you to get sharp photos from static targets with lower shutter speeds a tripod will also help still the movement of your subject in the frame as long as it isn't moving I'll show you later in this video the best techniques in using one the second sharpness issue related to movement is the movement of the subject in the field of view to get sharp photos your subject needs to be still in the frame while the exposure takes place if the subject is moving quickly and moves while the shutter is open the subject in your photo won't be sharp you need enough shutter speed to freeze the movement of your subject and good panning technique to slow its movement through the frame the shutter speed needed will depend primarily on the speed of your subject but also impacted by the length of your lens your distance to the subject and your sensor's crop factor needing more shutter speed to freeze the movement based on the speed of your subject is somewhat self-explanatory if movement in the frame is bad then faster movement is making it worse if the subject is moving around but not very quickly you can freeze them at 1 500th of a second if you try to shoot kids running around or sports or fast cars you need something like one one thousandth of a second fast flying birds or erratic moving subjects may need one two thousandth of a second and finally freezing the wings on a hummingbird 130 200th or one four thousandth of a second if you want to keep things simple you can use these and they'll work well ninety percent of the time but if you want more Precision there are three variables that you can consider when applying these baselines one is that the longer your focal length the faster the apparent motion these subjects will have through your field of view because they're larger in the frame as we discussed earlier faster motion through the field of view increases the risk of movement while the shutter is open as such when I shoot Wildlife with my 500 millimeter lens at a 1.4 teleconverter equaling 700 millimeters I use more shutter speed than let's say my 100 to 400 lens at 200 millimeters the former 700 millimeters would usually make me add about 25 percent to the numbers I gave you earlier for shutter speeds for my 100 to 400 at 200 millimeters I can usually trim that down by about 25 secondly the distance to the subject matters if this isn't jumping out at you consider the following thought experiment as Einstein would have called it if you're standing a kilometer away from a road watching car is moving how long do you think it would take to watch a car go through the field of view of your camera going left to right 20 seconds then if you were standing on the sidewalk next to the road and try the same thing how long would the car take to pass through the field of view likely less than one tenth of a second so closer subjects move faster through your field of view if your subject is only 5 or 10 meters away add to the shutter speed numbers we saw earlier maybe 25 percent more on the other hand if your subject is 100 meters away you can reduce those shutter speeds by 25 or even 50 percent also when it comes to subject movement there's the crop factor of your camera sensor so if you think you need one one thousandth of a second one one thousandth becomes a thousand times one point five or one fifteen hundredth of a second or one sixteen hundredth for the closest shutter speed now that we have the shutter speeds needed we can also maximize sharpness on moving subjects by tracking their movement accurately reducing the speed of the movement in the field of view instead of this we can have this to do this the goal is to track the movement but by attempting to keep the subject as still as possible in the field of view for maximum sharpness it's not good enough to have the subject just be anywhere in the viewfinder if you're shooting handheld tuck in your elbows and place them against your chest this will prohibit the lens moving up and down while you're moving around also stand facing slightly right of your target putting more lens on the left elbow and while looking in the viewfinder rotate your whole upper body as one don't throw out your elbows and leave the camera and lens floating in the air if you have a panning mode on your lens use it this is mode 2 for Canon and Sony Sports mode for Nikon this makes the lens only stabilize up and down and not right to left this works better as otherwise your lens would keep trying to stabilize against your sideways movement which is what you're trying to do some lens brands also work best at high shutter speeds by turning the image stabilization off when shooting at over let's say one one thousand or one two thousandth of a second this is brand dependent so you'll need to experiment I happen to shoot Canon lenses with the image stabilization on regardless of the shutter speed and that works fine for me but my Nikon friends in particular turn theirs off at higher shutter speeds the third major issue around movement that impacts the sharpness of long lenses in particular is shutter vibration and the movement of the mirror on a DSLR which needs to go up and down every time a photo is taken on wide angle lenses this can often be ignored but on Long focal lengths the movement of the the camera just when the shutter is open is a sharpness killer but there are some techniques that we can use to dampen the vibration of the shutter and the mirror one technique is to still the vibration by stabilizing the lens and the camera a good technique is to use a sturdy tripod or a monopod this dampens any movement and helps keep things steady you can improve the dampening performance of these with a few techniques one is to place your hand on the lens to stabilize it and this is something that I see being done in my opinion poorly you see all the time people placing their hand on the lens at the same place that the tripod or monopod are attached to the lens this is actually the least effective place to put your hand why because you're not stopping the lens from moving around as you have no leverage all you're doing is reinforcing a a rotation Point allowing the lens to still move on the end of the barrel is much more effective you can put pressure down up or sideways I've tried them all they all work if you're using a monopod here's an extra trick place the monopod foot close to you and use a knee or leg to Bow the monopod out slightly it makes a super stable base don't forget you can also use a bean bag put your lens on your knees when sitting on the ground or put your lens on a tree branch or a rock all of these help so what else can we do to stabilize camera vibration don't stab the shutter given what we know about the importance of stopping movement while the shutter is open when would be the worst time to poke your camera right when you're taking a photo or pressing the shutter button squeeze it slowly or place your finger next to the shutter button and just roll it over gently do not stab also recent technology has brought us another solution if you have a mirrorless camera the electronic shutter is a great way to avoid shutter vibration just switch your camera to the electronic shutter mode this means the photo is taken by just taking an electronic reading of the sensor data no mechanical movement is needed okay okay so now we've gotten enough shutter speed to freeze lens movement enough shutter speed and technique to freeze the movement of the subject and we have great stabilization techniques to still the movement of the camera and the shutter or mirror what else can we do with our long lenses one thing we can do is shoot our lens at its sweet spot that is its sharpest aperture this is because most lenses aren't at their sharpest wide open at maximum aperture most long lenses benefit from being stopped down that is using a smaller aperture that's because in lens design the farther from the center you go the more Optical aberrations and Imperfections start showing up one full stop is a great place to start that doesn't rob you of too much light nor make you lose that blurry background if that's part of your style of Photography some lenses like this 500 millimeter F4 is at its sharpest wide open at F4 and that's why it's terribly expensive but most are sharpest at smaller apertures so try shooting your F 2.8 lens at F4 F4 lens at F5 0.6 or 5.6 at f8 I like shooting this 100 to 400 lens at F 6.3 or F 7.1 rather than a wide open at F 5.6 when I want maximum sharpness but note that more stop down isn't better in perpetuity less light coming through your lens will mean higher isos and more noise and something called diffraction makes lenses less sharp when the aperture is very very small to find your lenses Sweet Spot take test exposures at varying apertures to compare them the fine print on the back of a cereal box taped to the wall in your kitchen makes a great test chart use a tripod and a two second timer or shutter release to reduce the variables in your test the use of a two second timer and shutter release can also be used in the field for sharpness if your subject isn't moving and you're on a tripod if you're using a DSLR with a mirror this works best in Live View mode with the mirror locked up just get your subject in the frame Focus the camera and use a two second timer or the shutter release to take the photo this takes the shot without any movement added by the photographer and I said I'd give you a bonus tip and one that hurts this is the stabilization tip that pulls the last bit of sharpness out of your photos and this is to mash your eyebrow against the viewfinder eye cup when shooting with long lenses and I mean hard I'm able to do this even with glasses by tipping my head slightly forward and placing my eyebrow against the top of the eye cup what this does is it stabilizes the camera vibration for the shutter down to almost zero really squeezing out the last drops of sharpness this is an almost essential technique for using teleconverters on Long super telephoto lenses like the 500 F4 and 600 F4 with two times teleconverters these lenses become 1 000 and 1200 millimeters even longer equivalents with crop sensors this magnifies even the smallest movement this technique is what makes teleconverters really shine on those lenses here's some photos taken using these techniques handheld the crop ability on some really sharp lenses gets quite amazing after one session of almost two hours long shooting these turns my eyebrow actually hurt I was pressing so hard it actually felt raw to the touch but check out how deeply I can crop this photo to reveal the gorgeous detail a second bonus tip the large lens hood on many long lenses makes getting a stable lens on Windy days much more difficult when it's really windy out take your lens hood off this includes if your shooting out of the window of a moving car or from a helicopter if after all these techniques your photos still aren't sharp you may be having Focus issues to find out more about those and how to fix them I have a whole video on nailing Focus which you can see right here if you found this video helpful give it a like and YouTube will show it to even more people get out there and take your own amazing photos I know you can do it

Channel: Simon d'Entremont

Views: 164,370

Keywords: photography, photography tips, photography tutorial, digital photography, photography tutorials, photography tips and tricks, quality photos, learn photography, photography tricks, cameras, mirrorless, settings, camera settings, sharpness, sharp photos, sharp photos every time, sharp photos with canon r6, sharp photos with kit lens, sharp photos lightroom, sharp photoshop, telephoto, telephoto lens, long lens technique, sharper photos, how to get sharp photos, sharp images

Id: 14L-J0LEWoc

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023