What Every Photographer Should Know About Lenses

hi my name is Dave bode for tuts plus and thanks so much for checking out this course if you're a photographer and you want to know more about lenses this is the course for you you're gonna start by learning about focal length and field of view because this is the most important aspect of any lens system next you're gonna learn about aperture you're going to find out what aperture does and the two main areas that aperture affects depth of field and diffraction next you're going to learn about what makes a good lens by taking a look at a bad lens there you're gonna learn about things like blurring loss of contrast chromatic aberration barrel and pincushion distortion and more you're going to learn about special lens features things like image stabilization optical glass coatings and special focusing motors then you're going to learn about several different specific classes of lenses things like the standard zoom lens a wide angle zoom lens medium telephoto zoom lenses and telephoto zoom lenses you're going to learn about super zoom lenses and why these are probably the ultimate travel lens then we're going to talk about prime lenses and discuss the pros and cons of using a prime lens then you're going to learn about one of my most favorite specialty prime lenses of fisheye lens you're also going to learn a little bit about macro photography by checking out some lenses that have a macro feature and you're going to learn how we can take an ordinary lens and add an extension tube and turn that into a macro lens finally we're going to be taking a look at a few examples of how we can use focal length and field of view combined with perspective to change the composition of our shots we're going to start by taking a look at how focal length and field of view has an effect on the human face and we're gonna check out what that looks like over a wide range of focal lengths then we're going to apply that same concept to shooting objects outside where we have a little bit more room to be able to move around and recompose our images throughout the entire course we're going to be looking at different example photos for each one of those lens types so you can get an idea of what those lenses are best suited for we're going to cover a tremendous amount in this course we're gonna see how to create some really fantastic looking images and hopefully have some fun along the way with that said you're ready to get started so make sure you check out the very next lesson where you're going to learn about focal length and field of view the basic description of a photographic lens is focal length because this determines how much of the world in front of your camera you will be able to fit on your image sensor in other words how much will you be able to see through the eyes of your camera in this lesson you're going to learn what focal length is and how focal length and field of view are related the first thing to sort out is what focal length actually is despite what you may have previously thought focal length is not a description of how long or short a lens is physically focal length is the distance in millimeters from the optical center of the lens to your camera's image sensor when the lens is focused at infinity the optical center is the point where all light rays intersect inside the lens unless you're going to pursue a career in optics we really don't have to go too much further than this because it's more important to understand how focal length relates to what you see the focal length of a lens determines its angle of view or field of view and thus how much the subject will be magnified or reduced for a given photographic position a shorter focal length results in a wider field of view a longer focal length results in a more narrow field of view this is one of the most important things to understand about lenses because the focal length of a lens is telling you how much of the world you will be able to see from your current position for example if you're standing here and you're trying to shoot a building with a 50 millimeter lens you would get this much of it in your frame in order to get more of the building in your shot you basically have three choices you can stand in the same spot and shoot multiple images and then stitch them together in Photoshop stand in the same spot and use a shorter focal length like 18 millimeters or use the same 50 millimeter lens and move way back to get the building in your shot what this example shows is that one focal length is not good for all situations what if we couldn't move back then we would have to rely on the stitched method but we do have options in this example we were using a fixed focal length lens which is called a prime lens most photographers will start out with a zoom lens which is essentially a variable focal length lens with almost any interchangeable lens camera system you can get a fantastic range of focal lengths in lenses that covers super wide to the very very site later in this course we are going to explore how focal length affects composition and how it affects people's faces for now we need to talk about sensor size somewhere along the line you may have heard the term crop sensor or digital photo lens first let's talk about crop sensor digital photo cameras have sensors that record the images projected by the lens and sensors are not all the same size the quote unquote standard is full-frame which is the 35 millimeter film equivalent if your camera has a sensor that's smaller than full-frame which most of the cameras in the world are then it's a crop sensor there are three major categories that camera sensors fall into full-frame aps-c and micro four-thirds there are more sizes than this but these are the most popular camera makers have different names for these sizes Nikon calls the full frame format FX while Sony and Canon call this full frame Sony and Canon use aps-c to describe the sensors that use the aps-c format while Nikon calls this format DX finally Micro Four Thirds is pretty much called Micro Four Thirds by everyone the word crop is a reference to what happens when you stick a lens on these cameras if we put a 50 millimeter lens on a full-frame camera we would get an image that looks something like this if we put that same 50 millimeter lens on a camera with a smaller sensor like an aps-c size we get a different image that looks something like this if we put that lens on a Micro Four Thirds camera it's gonna look like this the lens is the same on all cameras but the images look different what happens is that a lens acts like a projector light from the world in front of the lens is projected and brought in to focus on the image sensor on a full-frame camera it looks like this but an aps-c sensor is smaller so it looks like this essentially we are seeing less of the projected image a Micro Four Thirds camera is even smaller than aps-c so it sees even less of the projected image the effect is that the smaller sensors are cropping compared to the full-frame sensor this doesn't mean if the photos will be smaller because these smaller sensors may have the same or more pixels because they are only seeing the center portion of the projected image they are seeing less of the world this means that in order to get a shot that is comparable on a camera with a smaller sensor we have to use a shorter focal length lens or move back farther to get the same composition now at some point someone may have told you that a 50 millimeter lens on your aps-c Canon camera is really an 80 millimeter lens this is sometimes referred to as equivalent focal length but it should be called equivalent field of view the reason is a 50 millimeter lens did not change its focal length once you mounted it on a different camera what changes is the crop and the equivalent field of view so a 50 millimeter lens on a Canon aps-c sized sensor is similar to an 80 millimeter lenses field of view on a full-frame camera this is also referred to as a field of view crop factor aps-c has a crop factor of 1.6 X for Canon cameras and 1.5 X for Nikon cameras Micro Four Thirds has a 2x crop a 50 millimeter lens four-thirds camera would have a similar field of view to a 100 millimeter lens on a full-frame camera unfortunately if you have not spent time shooting on a full-frame or film camera this is all rather meaningless the way I like to think about it is like this a crop sensor camera will be tighter and getting ultra wide angles will have more Distortion once you start shooting with your camera for a while you will start to understand how to interpret this equivalent field of view much better for now just remember that a lower focal length means wider and the higher focal length means tighter or more narrow when you're looking at lenses you might see a term like digital lens or designed for digital cameras Canon calls this EFS and Nikon calls this DX and other lens makers have different names for this as well these lenses are designed for smaller aps-c cameras this enables them to be made smaller and lighter containing less glass and be less expensive some of these lenses like this Canon ef-s lens cannot be mounted on a full-frame camera because of this rear lens element that protrudes out of the back of the lens even though the Canon mounts are the same this rear lens element would hit the mirror on a full-frame camera and that would not be good this is not true of all lenses for example this lens right here made by Tokina was designed for digital cameras but it does not have a rear lens protrusion so this will actually fit on a full-frame camera however because these quote-unquote digital lenses are designed to cover a smaller image sensor sometimes they won't fill a full-frame sensor which means that even though you can fit this on a full frame camera specifically a Canon full-frame camera the projected image from this lens would not cover the sensor which means that you get black along the edges it would project kind of a circle right in the center of it now in some zoom lenses some parts of the focal range will actually cover a full-frame sensor for example on this lens right here I believe once you get past around 14 millimeters it will cover a full-frame image sensor but at it's very widest which is 11 millimeters this lens won't and you basically have a circle right in the center of your full-frame imager we will explore focal lengths and how it affects images and composition later in this course for now you're ready to move on to the next section where you're going to learn about aperture another one of those confusing numbers on lenses is aperture in this lesson you will learn what aperture is and how it affects the image you'll also learn the difference between constant and variable wide aperture lenses and what this is going to look like in your shots aperture is a hole or opening through which light travels in photography lenses the aperture is usually specified as an F number and a lens typically has a set of marked f stops the VF number can be set to a lower F number is a larger opening and a higher F number is a smaller opening the larger opening lets in more light and the smaller opening lets in less light the photography term 1 f-stop corresponds to a light intensity change factor of two for example if we set a lens to f/4 we will get a certain amount of light that enters our camera if we change the aperture to f 2.8 we will have effectively doubled the light we are allowing to reach the image sensor if we change this again to f/2 we are doubling the amount of light again compared to when we first had the aperture set to f/4 we are now letting in four times as much light the largest f-stop a lens can be set to is called its maximum aperture this will vary from lens to lens generally more expensive lenses have a larger maximum aperture so the most basic thing we need to know about aperture is that it controls the amount of light that is let into our camera sometimes more light is referred to as faster for example if we adjust our aperture from F or 2f 2.8 you might say that we are using a faster aperture or if your lenses at maximum aperture is f 2.8 and you are not getting the correct exposure you might say I need to get a faster lens fast is referring to the shutter speed if we are maxed out on sensor gain or ISO we can get a good exposure with a smaller aperture by using a longer or slower exposure time or shutter speed the problem is that slower exposure times don't work for a lot of situations because they will result in motion blur by using a faster lens that has a larger maximum aperture we are going to let more light into the camera and thus we will be able to use a faster shutter speed or exposure time let's look at an example all right in this example we're going to check out what difference a quote-unquote fast lens can make in terms of stopping motion and why it's called a fast lens so we're looking at a little scene here this is the back of my camera so you can see what kind of camera settings that I'm using and then off in the distance there you can see something moving now that is my automatic motorized camera slider that I built myself thank you very much and the reason is because in the real world it's hard to get people and other objects to remain constant and you know if we were shooting outside the light may change and that may change our metering so this is a very controlled setup to see what happens and what we're gonna get in terms of the exposure here so I'm gonna take it out of live view here and I'm set to manual my ISO is currently set to 3200 which is pretty high it's not as high as it can go on this camera but it's as high as we're going to go for this example and the reason is because we're going to kind of use what you might consider the highest ISO on your camera and we're just going to pretend that 3200 is the highest acceptable ISO on this camera I'm set to F 4.5 which is the highest that this lens can go because I have a super zoom lens on this camera it's an 18 to 270 millimeter F 3.5 to 6.3 and it's currently set to 50 millimeters and I'm also an evaluative metering which is what that little icon means right there and so when I meet her this right now it says I'm a just a hair under so it's telling me one tenth of a second here is going to get well maybe maybe one 13th of a second is going to be the right exposure alright so I want to take the photo we're gonna check out what this looks like here have set the two second timer and if we take a look at this photo you're gonna see that there is motion blur because one tenth of a second at 50 millimeters is not enough to stop the motion of that camera slider and if this were the best eye so if this were the highest ISO that you could use on your camera without you know being ridiculously noisy or maybe your camera just has an ISO limit of 3200 then this would be a problem now this camera can go up to ISO 12800 but that's crazy crazy noisy so in this particular case it would be better to use a quote-unquote faster lens because it's going to give us a better maximum aperture and therefore we're gonna be able to get a better shutter speed out of this so let me change lenses and let's check out what that looks like all right I've just changed lenses and I put it on here my nifty 50 Canon 50 millimeter prime lens and it has a maximum aperture of f-18 so I can take this and I can roll it up to F 1.8 and now when I have pressed the shutter button it's going to be two stops overexposed so now what I can do is I can make the shutter speed a little bit faster here and I'm gonna be able to get well says 160 is like one third underexposed one fiftieth of a second it looks like it's just about there so I'm gonna take this shot now one fiftieth of a second and when we look at the exposure what we're gonna see is the motion blur is a lot better now it's not perfect right we could probably go to maybe one sixtieth of a second that might help tighten it up just a hair there is a tiny bit of motion blur but you can see that that is gonna be a lot more usable and so this faster lens here is gonna allow us to use a shutter speed that's much much better for this particular situation if our limit was ISO 3200 then the other lens would not be usable inside without a flash with a flash we would be able to add more light to our scene and we'd be able to use a faster shutter speed without a flash right if we were just shooting in available light this is the best we would be able to get now F one pointing is not the fastest 50 millimeter that you can get you can get an F one point four you can get an F one point two lenses fifty millimeter lenses that are F one point two are above a thousand dollars and you can get a manual focus only lens that is F point nine five I believe which is even faster that's gonna definitely be fast enough to stop the motion at least this motion here in this example but you can see how it was very inexpensive $100 Prime here gives us a nice bump it's over two full stops better from f4 2f 2.8 is one stop F 2.8 2 F 2 is 2 full stops and this is one point is that's like two and I think a third may be so it's giving us two and a third stops better plus we started at f4 point five so that's probably two and two-thirds stops better we can really get something that's a lot nicer with a faster line so faster lens makes a huge difference when you're shooting inside or any time that the light is low usually that's going to be when you're inside but I suppose it could be when you're outside in the moonlight you know and that would make a difference there as well but primarily you'll find the biggest benefit for fast lenses inside when you're not using a flash what this means is that when the light is low as in when you're shooting inside you want to lens with a larger maximum aperture as noise levels on cameras get better as time goes on this will become less of an issue for now getting a lens with a fast aperture will result in cleaner sharper images in low light so what's considered fast for a zoom lens it's f 2.8 and for a prime lens its F 2.8 and above like F 21.8 1.4 1.2 and even point we'll talk more about zooms and Prime's later in this course aperture has a few side effects that we need to talk about such as depth of field and diffraction depth of field sometimes abbreviated as DOF is the distance between the nearest and the farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptable sharp in an image another way to think about this is the area in front and behind the point of focus that appears to be in focus depth of field is a rather complex topic and if you want more information you can check out a fantastic course that I put together called mastering depth of field and exposure right here on Tut's plus for now we are just going to think about depth of field as the part of our scene that is sharply in focus aperture controls depth of field and it works like this a larger aperture or lower number has a shorter depth of field and a smaller aperture or larger number has a longer depth of field this is important because this is an area that you will want to control if you are outside and you need a lot of depth of field you're going to use a smaller aperture like f11 f-16 F 20 maybe even f-22 if you are shooting a portrait you might want to use a shorter depth of field to isolate your subject maybe something like f/4 or F 2.8 most all lenses will be able to give you a small enough aperture to satisfy your long depth of field needs so that's not really an issue if you want super short depth of field you're going to need a faster lens and this is what can separate a lot of lenses some zoom lenses have a constant wide aperture this means that no matter where you are in the lenses zoom range the aperture remains the same this is contrasted by lenses that have a variable wide aperture these lenses usually start at a wider aperture on the short end of their zoom range for example this Tamron 18 to 270 millimeter lens is F three point five to six point three as we go from 18 millimeters to 270 millimeters the aperture gets smaller this means that at the long end this lens is letting in a lot less light an aperture of f/16 nearly as wide as f 2.8 but if you are shooting outside in nice bright sunlight it would work just fine the thing to remember is that with variable aperture at lenses you have less control over the depth of field and light levels as you use higher focal lengths the other effective aperture that I mentioned earlier is diffraction again without getting super technical this is what you need to know diffraction is the bending of light rays at smaller apertures this causes the image to become noticeably less sharp this is sort of an odd thing because usually lens has become more sharp as you use smaller apertures but diffraction is not an on/off switch it's a gradual effect diffraction is also limited by sensor size and not lenses on a full-frame sensor you would be able to use apertures down to f-22 without seeing diffraction start to degrade the image on an aps-c and Micro Four Thirds cameras the limit is around f11 which is two full stops higher than full-frame this doesn't mean that you can't shoot at f-22 on these smaller sensors you can but it will be a softer image if you wanted to reduce the light coming into the lens on a crop sensor camera without losing detail you could use the smallest aperture before you start to see diffraction and then pop on an ND filter to cut a few more stops again the main thing to understand about aperture is that it controls the amount of light and conversely the depth of field as you move throughout this course you're going to see examples of fast Prime's and zoom lenses with variable apertures for now you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you will learn about what a good lens is by checking out what a bad lens looks like if you look around at all at photo lenses you will see a vast difference in prices generally more expensive lenses are better but why the easiest way to explain this is to look at what a bad lens looks like because a good lens is a lens that does not exhibit the characteristics of a bad lens lenses are only good compared to other lenses in this lesson you will learn about blurring loss of contrast chromatic aberration then getting and Distortion by taking a look at some crappy lenses first up let's look at blurring in photography we want to capture as much detail as we can if we want to selectively blur our image in post-production we can but it makes sense to start with something sharp blurring in lenses is not the part of the image that is out of focus it's either motion blur or a lack of sharpness from the lens let's take a look for this example we're going to be taking a look at two photos that I took at about 18 millimeters I'll show you the properties here right there 18 millimeters and they're obviously of a brick wall and I chose to do a brick wall because it's flat and it has a lot of detail in it if you're looking at this photo like this you're kind of seeing the entire thing and it doesn't really look too bad you're not seeing blurring but if you are a pixel peeper which means you like to look at things at a one-to-one pixel ratio then you're gonna see something different so if i zoom up here and now we're looking at a hundred percent in the center this looks fairly decent but as I scroll over here especially to this corner usually images are the most soft in the corner so that's what we're gonna check out you're gonna see that there's a noticeable drop-off in sharpness right here we're still pretty sharp but right around here you're seeing a looks like someone smeared some jelly on the lens now we're going to compare this with this image right here and we're going to go up and check out what's happening in the corner here now both of these images exhibit blurring but one of them looks much worse and the one that looks much worse is the cheap kit lens that came with my very first DSLR it's a canon ef-s 18 to 55 millimeter F 3.5 to 5.6 and it's not a very sharp lens now this particular photo was taken at F 3.5 and if we check out the other photo here the other photo was taken to F 2.8 so this photo here was taken at F 2.8 and you're seeing some blurring but check out the difference between this photo in this photo can you see the difference there this guy right here goes from you know this is looking okay you can actually see though right on the edge of this photo especially in the corners that it goes from okay sharpness we zoom right up in the center this is reasonable sharpness but as you go towards the edge whoa this gets way out of control in the blurring Department I mean that's just bad but even if we take this image and then we'll go back here and we're going to just zoom up right on the center this one then I'll go back to this one and we'll zoom right up on the center this one check out the difference between this in this now they're not exactly the same because I think I bumped the tripod a little bit but just look at the difference in sharpness and this is comparing Center sharpness and on the lens lenses are usually the sharpest dead-center okay so this lens right here is clearly better and it's also better as we just saw in the corners but overall this second lens has an issue with blurring it's just not as sharp as a better lens it's a more high quality piece of glass even in the center now this is an awful sharpness but it's certainly not as good as this you can see this is much sharper you can especially tell if you look at the details in the shadows right here just look at how sharp these shadows are rendered right in the center okay so keep your eye on that and then we go to this second one you can see there's more just very slightly more of a gradation there between these two images I mean they were taken probably less than 15 seconds apart so there's no shift in the lighting in fact on this day there were zero clouds in the sky so it's the exact same lighting there's no softening of the light and you can see that this second lens here we'd call kind of a crappy lens it's awful on the edges and in the corners and even the center sharpness is not as good as a more high quality lens now the second lens here is a sigma 17 to 50 millimeter F 2.8 so it's a constant aperture lens and it's showing you sharpness at a more wide open aperture if we were to look at this photo here let me just pull this up so you can see this shot is with that same Sigma lens but now it's at F 3.5 and usually as you stop a lens down it's going to become sharper so now they're at the same exact aperture they're both F 3.5 in this second shot here is probably going to look maybe just a hair sharper it may not be perceivable that much but if we look in the corner here you can see in the extreme corners it is showing you some sharpness and usually unless you're talking about the very best lenses you're usually gonna see a little bit of blurring in the corners especially with zoom lenses prime lenses maybe not so much but you can see even in the center of these two images if you were to only have this as your reference point you'd say that's okay but compared to this you'd say yeah that's not so great right it's not like ridiculously sharper but if we were just to go over you know just we're still in the middle here and we're gonna look at the edge performance so not the corner we're just looking at the edge now and so this is the kind of the cheaper crappier lens and this is the better lens you can see looks much sharper so that right there is what blurring looks like in better lenses will do a better job with sharpness and it won't exhibit as much blurring especially in the corners and on the edges of the image one of the things that makes a lens great is nice-looking contrast contrast is detail in lenses that have poor contrast performance just like blurring lack detail let's check out an example in this example we're going to look at the difference between two different lenses again on this picture of this desk here that I took and I kind of backlit this with a studio strobe if you can see here we have picture a and picture B and they look really quite similar the image shifts just a hair but you know they're they're pretty close they're both taking on about 50 millimeters at somewhere I think around F 5.6 right yeah again just like the last image if you're looking at the full image here they both look okay or you you can't really see a huge difference what we're looking at is contrast right the difference between light and dark both of these were taken with the same flash setting so it's going to be very very consistent between these because this is not a battery-powered speed light this is a studio strobe so the consistency between these two shots is going to be pretty good but just look at the difference between the contrast now this second one is obviously sharper right that's pretty plain to see but what we're looking at is the difference between the contrast of these two images which is pretty subtle right I mean this one isn't awful but this one you'd say that's better and what I'm seeing is that this one looks punch here the colors look a little bit more deep there it just looks a little bit more contrast II this one just looks flatter and particularly I'm looking at this area right here I'm looking at the color tones in here and I'm looking at the general kind of difference between the light and the dark tones in here especially compared to this outer non shadowed area here where it's getting the direct light so if we look at this and then we go to here this to me just looks like it has better contrast you can just see that the in the second image just look punch here they look deeper they look richer right and that's another difference that you'll see between crappy lenses and better lenses chromatic aberration is a type of distortion in which there is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same convergence point put simply chromatic aberration is a smearing of the colors that you can see on the edges of objects let's take a look all right in this example we're gonna look at another pair of images here and this time we're looking at chromatic aberration again if we're looking at the whole image chromatic aberration is not going to be a huge deal right it's not going to be something that if you post your pictures to facebook or if someone's looking at a smaller image a smaller print chromatic aberration may not be a huge deal and it can be corrected to some degree in Photoshop Lightroom aperture or something that processes RAW images or even JPEGs for that matter it can be corrected but much better to start with an image that has less of it because as you're going to see in a second chromatic aberration does affect the image pretty drastically so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna punch in to this image you can see this image looks pretty good now particularly where we're going to see chromatic aberration is between high contrast points so on this lens we are seeing chromatic aberration right here it's red between this white part and the dark part here you can see there's a little red haze here and around other parts of this image you're gonna see that crop up as well it's not too bad but you you are going to see it if we're looking in the trees here in between the leaves and the sky which is very high contrast we can see a little bit of chromatic aberration it's very very subtle very subtle but we can definitely see along this super high contrast edge right here there is chromatic aberration now let's compare that with this image and if we punch up here we're gonna see something completely different now first let's look at this leafy area here what you're seeing here is a different kind of chromatic aberration and this is more commonly referred to as purple fringing and just like the other image here this is chromatic aberration of the more red wavelengths of light and this is chromatic aberration in the more bluish ends of the spectrum this lens is not focusing the violet wavelengths properly which is wine why we're getting this purple fringing now you can see that we are getting purple fringing here along the same points that we were on the other lens but this lens is terrible I mean this is awful every single high contrast point looks like we smeared Vaseline on it I mean that's not good for one this lens is not nearly as sharp as the other lens but even if it wasn't as sharp we're still seeing chromatic aberration just ruin parts of this image especially these real high contrast points in the trees here it just looks like there's a big giant purple glow around everything now we can clean this up a little bit in a photo processing application but this is pretty bad now this lens I also got with my very first DSLR this is a quant array 70 to 300 millimeter zoom lens I believe it's f/4 point five to six point three or something this is a canon 70 to 200 millimeter F 2.8 is I think that quanta a lens cost about a hundred and sixty dollars this Canon lens costs over two thousand dollars this is a Canon L Series lens that's one of their professional quote unquote lenses but there's a huge difference in a crappy lens versus a professional lens like this right you can just see that's just a huge mess and that's really not so bad big difference there higher-end lenses use LD or low dispersion glass that contain floor a these hybridized glasses have very low levels of optical dispersion thus resulting in less chromatic aberration next let's look at vignetting in photography and optics vignetting is a reduction of the images brightness or saturation at the periphery compared to the image center many lenses have vignetting when set to their maximum aperture but lower quality optics will have more vignetting also usually gets better as you stop the lens down let's take a look in this example we're gonna be checking out vignette encoder of something very interesting here it's just a plain white wall and and the white balance was not set properly on my camera so it actually looks yellow but that doesn't really matter because what we're going to be looking at is how a vignette a on these lenses is affecting our image and the reason that I shot a let's say it's a yellow wall here is that when you're shooting in the real world the vignetting is often much more difficult to see because you don't know if you're seeing vignette inaturalist a salad color that's lit extremely flatly so that we can see what the lens is actually doing now this image does not look like it's displaying any vignetting but if we look at this other image now we're seeing something different we are seeing a definite darkening in the corners and along the edge of this image now we're going to see even getting more on the sides than we will the top because this imager is wider than it is tall which means as we get closer to the edges of the projected image circle we are going to see more vignette and we're going to get closer on the sides and we are at the top because this is wider I should say that crop sensor cameras do much better with vignetting than a full-frame or larger sensor camera especially if you're using non crop lenses or non digital lenses because these are projecting an image circle appropriate to fill a full-frame camera and these photos are in fact taken on an aps-c sized camera which means that the full image circle is larger than this imager so we're not seeing as much of in getting as we would on a full-frame camera if we stuck these same two lenses on a full-frame camera we would see more vignetting probably out of both lenses especially out of this one because this is obviously pretty bad but if you can imagine as it gets darker here on a full-frame we just extend this out farther and we'd see more darkening of the image so it's going to be more prevalent when you're using a larger sensor and a lens that's designed for a larger sensor now if you're using a crop sensor and a digital lens that means that the image circle is going to be made to just fit that imager on a crop sensor camera which means you're going to see more of in getting as opposed to if you used a regular lens but still on a crop sensor camera vignetting is something that you will see in lenses and you can see between these two images although it's subtle this one definitely has a darkening on the edges of the image distortion is another effect that can be present on many lenses there are two major types of distortion barrel and pincushion in barrel distortion image magnification decreases with distance from the optical axis or Center the apparent effect is that of an image which has been mapped around a sphere or barrel in a zoom lens barrel distortion appears in the middle of the lens's focal length range and is the worst at the wide end of the range let's take a look so let's check out what barrel distortion looks like we're looking at an image of the brick wall again that we looked at earlier but this time we're gonna be focusing on what's happening to the distortion of this image now sometimes barrel distortion is hard to see until you compare it with a corrected version okay so this is that same image and this is a photo taken with the Canon ef-s 18 to 55 millimeter lens and this is the corrected distortion version okay so I took this into Adobe raw camera processor in Photoshop and I corrected for the lens's Distortion the automatic settings that it provides from the profile of this lens and so you can see as we toggle between these two images this is what barrel distortion looks like we get this kind of bulge of the image towards the center where it looks like the image is being mapped around a barrel and that's where the term barrel distortion comes from okay now here's two more examples all right this is another lens this is the Sigma 17 to 50 millimeter lens and this is the original non corrected version and this is the corrected version okay and you can see as we go from this image to this image right here this is the Canon this is the Sigma alright Canon Sigma that the barrel distortion is much more pronounced on the cheaper Canon lens now that may be partially due to the fact that the Canon lens is a little bit more of a variable focal length lens so that's 18 to 55 millimeters where this is 17 to 50 millimeters okay so it's a little bit more telephoto and as lenses have more of a telephoto range the more zoom range you have in a lens the more distortion you can expect that the long short end of the focal length so that is probably why this lens here we're looking at the non corrected version again looks a little bit better than this right here we're seeing much more distortion in the less correction that has to be made the better the result will be because you'll get less stretching of the image and that's gonna look a good bit better in pincushion distortion image magnification increases with distance from the optical axis or Center the visible effect is that lines that do not go through the center of the image are bowed inward toward the center of the image like a pin cushion let's take a look in this next series of images we're gonna be looking at pincushion distortion pincushion distortion usually occurs at the longer end of the focal range okay so in this particular image we're looking at the side of a building and this is shot at 200 millimeters and this was shot with a Tamron 18 to 270 millimeter lens so that's a super zoom lens which we're going to talk more about later in this course and what we're looking at here is the pincushion distortion this image here is the no lens correction version now all four of these images have been corrected for their perspective just so I can get them lined up pretty similarly but this image has not had the lens distortion corrected in it and so just on the surface here it's kind of hard to see what's going on but if we compare this to the corrected version you can see that there is definitely some pin cushioning going on now the center of the image looks like it's being squinched or squished and that is the pin cushion distortion so we get this kind of shrinking towards the center of the optical axis or basically the center of the image now let's compare that to this image right here which looks a little bit different this is shot with the Canon 72 200 L lens the is lens and this is the non lens corrected version and this is the corrected version you can see the difference between these two is very slight compared to this guy right here where it looks like there's a little bit more of a pin cushioning happening now there is pin cushioning in both of these but over here with the Tamron lens there's a little bit more a lot of times when you're looking at reviews of lenses they will talk about how well a lens handles vignette incrementally bere ssin or distortion now that you have a better understanding of what these things look like you'll be better informed when choosing a lens in the next lesson you will learn about some special features in lenses like stabilization lens coatings and fast focusing motors better lenses will often have features such as ultra-fast focusing motors fancy lens coatings or image stabilization but what are all these things is any of it actually worth it in this lesson you will learn about all of these features and why you might want to look for them in your next lens image stabilization is a fantastic feature to have in Allen's but what exactly is it lens based image stabilization or optical image stabilization our techniques used to reduce blurring associated with the motion of a camera during an exposure the sensors in the lens analyze vibrations and then apply correction via a special stabilizing lens grip that shift the image parallel to the focal plane motion blur is canceled resulting in a sharper image this allows you to shoot at slower shutter speeds and still get sharp images different lens makers have different names for these techniques such as OAS or optical image stabilization optical steadyshot SR which is Shake Reduction VC which is vibration cancellation fee are vibration reduction mega oh is and Canon just calls this is for image stabilisation there's also stabilization that can be done in the camera but what we're talking about here is done with the lens let's take a look at how this helps make sharper images so let's check out an example of image stabilization in action here we're taking a look at a video I shot in my backyard and I'm shooting handheld at about 18 millimeters with a DSLR now what I'm gonna do is switch on image stabilization and hold the camera the exact same way and check out the dramatic difference in what image stabilization does now it doesn't completely eliminate all motion but it does smooth it out tremendously now we're looking at a shot here I believe this is at about 270 millimeters and you can see the amount of shake is just incredible right it'd be very difficult to get a shot like this but as soon as I switch on image stabilization you can see the dramatic effect that it has on the image everything is smoothed out and things are looking much better now you will see some jitters and jumps from time to time but that's just the way image stabilization works so probably where you'll see image stabilization have the most dramatic effect is when you're at a more telephoto range so this first one here this image of these two horses on a playground was shot with the 270 millimeter lens handheld I was probably 20 or 25 feet away the shutter speed is one thirtieth of a second now if you're shooting at a focal length of 270 millimeters handheld on a crop sensor body that is really slow because the general rule in photography when you're shooting handheld is you shoot one over your focal length or your effective focal length and a 270 millimeter lens on a crop sensor body has the equivalent focal length of a 430 millimeter lens on a full-frame camera so what that means is the threshold shutter speed which means just probably barely sharp with good technique would be somewhere around one 500th of a second so a little bit faster than what the focal length is or the effective focal length is and what I shot this image app was one thirtieth of a second now you can see from this image here if we look at a one-to-one pixel crop this is not sharp there's motion blur in this image but that's because the image stabilization was off for this shot if we look at the next shot and we look at a one-to-one pixel crop what you'll see is that this image is acceptable sharp now it may not be as sharp as if I put it on a tripod but to my eye this looks perfectly fine and perfectly usable it's a heck of a lot better than the one that I shot right before it with image stabilization off that one is not usable at all there's way too much motion blur and one thirtieth of a second is way way slower than what we should be shooting at to get a sharp shot so if we were at one 500th of a second half of that would be one two hundred and fiftieth of a second okay so even at one two hundred and fiftieth of a second it would be very very difficult probably impossible to get a still shot using that kind of focal length handheld we cut that in half again now we're down to 125th of a second half of that would be one sixtieth of a second so that's three full stops or stops would be one thirtieth of a second there's no way you know even with really great technique you can shoot a still image at 270 millimeters on a crop sensor body at one thirtieth of a second is just not gonna happen let's check out a few other ones here I did another very similar one here I shot the side of a garbage can this one I shot at one fiftieth of a second so if you look at the one to one crop here of this sign even at one fiftieth of a second at the same focal length you can see there's definite motion blur there if you look at the next image where I turned image stabilization on same exact shutter speed this is what I would call acceptable sharp I can't see any signs of camera shake in this image which to me makes it work now it's not a great image because well it's the sign of a dumpster but I thought it would be good to look at because it has some very high contrast it's a white sign with black lettering on it which is very easy to see any tiny amounts of motion blur so you can see what a dramatic effect this has on your images now this won't stop motion because things in motion are not going to be affected by image stabilization what will be affected is your own cameras movement especially when you're shooting handheld shots lens coatings are treatments applied to the outer surfaces of lenss elements to reduce reflections reflections occur whenever a ray of light moves from one medium to another such as when light enters a sheet of glass after traveling through air some portion of the light is reflected from the surface without coatings each air to glass interface would reflect about four percent of the light that reaches it the reason this becomes important is because lenses are made up of several glass elements a complex lens without coatings would have as much as 70% of the light absorbed or scattered before it reached the image sensor most lenses these days have multi coatings at the very least and better lenses will have nano coatings which do a better job at reducing reflections where you might want to pay attention is when it comes to filters the cheapest aren't coated at all have a single coating on just one side the vast majority of even lower-priced filters have single coatings on each side the very best have multi coatings or nano coatings on both sides if you're shooting in let's say the direction of the Sun and you're using a cheaper filter you're going to be throwing away a lot of contrast and image quality in your images so lens coatings and filter coatings especially is something to consider finally let's talk about focusing motors one of the many acronyms you will see listed on lens models has to do with the focusing motor you will see SS m4 super-sonic motor and si m4 smooth autofocus motor in Sony lenses Tamron uses USD for ultrasonic silent Drive and pzd for piezo drive in their lenses USM stands for ultrasonic motor and these are found in some Canon lenses swm is silent wave motor and AFS is autofocus silent and these are found on Nikon or nikkor lenses STM is pen taxes supersonic drive motor HSM is Sigma's hypersonic motor if' stands for internal focusing and is found on many lenses from many manufacturers these lenses are constructed so they don't change in length as the lens is focused it also means that the front lens element doesn't rotate which can help with the use of some attachments like a petal shaped lens hood and polarizing filters the main point here is to distinguish these fast focusing lenses to the older servo style focusing mechanisms these older focusing motors are easy to spot as they make a good deal of noise and are somewhat slow you can still find these older style focusing systems used on lenses that are still being made and sold today having a lens that focuses super fast is a fantastic feature when you are shooting moving targets or anything dynamic slow focusing systems will not work for these shooting situations if you are looking for a lens having one of these ultra-fast focusing systems is a definite advantage now that we've covered the major special features that you will find on lenses you are ready to move on to the next chapter in this course where you are going to learn all about zoom lenses the standard zoom lens is a great lens to have for situations where you need flexibility and quality in this lesson you will learn why it's called a standard zoom and you will see examples of what you can get with a standard zoom lens a standard zoom lens is a lens that covers the normal focal length and offers a wider and a narrower field of view in photography and cinematography a normal lens or a lens that has a normal focal length is a lens that reproduces a field of view that renders objects roughly the same size as they appear to you in real life so for example I'm sitting here and often the distance here is a piano when I'm looking at the piano it's a certain size right it's like this Bay now if I put a quote unquote normal lens on my camera when I hold the camera up to my face the size of the piano is not going to change so it's going to look through the eyes of the camera or if you're looking at the back of the screen about the same size as it does in real life this is in contrast to a shorter focal length lens which would make the piano look smaller so in that case when I held the camera up to my face the size of the piano would be smaller because we were looking at a wider field of view or if we were using a longer focal length lens the sides of the piano would be bigger than it looks to me when I'm sitting right here so a normal focal length lens is a lens that has a field of view that makes objects look about the same size as they do in real life that's pretty much all there is to it so for a full-frame camera this would be about 50 millimeters for an aps-c this is around 28 to 30 millimeters depending if you're using a Canon or a Nikon AP s-see sized camera and four micro four-thirds it's about 23 millimeters if you had a full-frame camera a standard zoom might be 24 to 70 millimeter for an aps-c you'd be looking at a lens just like this which is a 17 to 50 millimeter and a micro four-thirds camera would be around 12 to 35 millimeters notice that if we apply the field of view crop factor multiplication to these lenses they're all about the same the 17 to 50 millimeter is the equivalent field of view of a 27 to 80 millimeter lens when we use the 1.6 x crop factor for canon aps-c sized cameras for Nikon's DX cameras we get a 25 to 75 millimeter equivalent field of view for the Micro Four Thirds cameras we just have to double it so we take the twelve to thirty five millimeter standard zoom and that's going to have the equivalent field of view of a 24 to 70 millimeter lens on a full-frame camera so all of these standard zoom lenses have roughly the same field of view it's also worth mentioning that for many cameras these lenses are interchangeable you can take a canon EF lens that was designed for a full-frame camera and put it on a canon aps-c camera it'll work just the same but you will have the fields of view crop factor to deal with which makes the lens have a narrower field of view you can also use these lenses with a Micro Four Thirds camera systems using an adapter depending on what adapter you use some of the features of the lens may or may not work properly so the 24 to 70 millimeter lenses in the equivalent field of view lenses on crop sensor cameras are the standard because they offer a general-purpose range from wide angle to short telephoto thereby giving you really fantastic flexibility let's take a look at what these standard zoom lenses look like in action all right we're gonna check out several photos that I've taken with a standard zoom lens over the last nine years or so now the first several photos are of a trip that I took to Kazakhstan and on that trip I used a cane eighteen of 55 millimeter lens on my canon 300 d digital rebel and it was a fantastic lens to give me a variety of shots because it covered pretty wide-angle stuff too a little bit tighter it was a great lens to have outside and even though it's not a fantastic lens it proved to be pretty nice for this particular trip especially you know there were a lot of great lens options back then for digital cameras in that focal range especially for a crop sensor camera and you can see we got some really awesome wide-angle stuff here on the 18 millimeter side and then you'll see some nice tighter stuff and it was great for a variety of things you know it allowed me to get fairly close so I had another lens with me on this trip 70 to 300 millimeter both were super inexpensive lenses here's a nice little beauty shot here an open window you can see I got some really great landscape shots here to show off and I got some some nice stuff that was a little bit tighter like this crazy looking bug there but you can see we can go from really wide to some stuff that's more portrait II in a 50 millimeter range of this lens and what we'll find out coming up shortly in this course is that 50 millimeters is actually a really nice kind of middle-of-the-road focal length for portraits maybe not the best focal length but it definitely works and it's much better than using a wide-angle lens but stuff like this in a car you can't get that with a medium telephoto lens or telephoto lens it's just physically not possible so that particular lens worked really great for that now the rest of the photos here were shot with another standard zoom lens this lens is the Sigma 17 to 50 millimeter F 2.8 with optical image stabilization and you can see here's some engagement photos that I shot with it and this works for a whole bunch of stuff as well you know it's a real similar focal length range works for taking pictures of just regular old stuff that was cake that my wife made on my daughter LS birthday in there and here's some shots that I shot with my family in Disneyworld you can see it's great for some nice architecture stuff and this is a shot of a live show here this is a great walking around lens because it gives you a really great range for focal inks here are some photos that I took of my good friends taught and Elizabeth around Christmastime a few years ago and I take a lot of only photos of my own family and my relatives my brothers and sisters families as well here's a show that I did on vacation here's a shot of my son at a Science Museum holding a dinosaur bone here's some more family photos that I took this time I used a flash with a reflector as a diffuser now I felt like this actually worked really well for this particular lens my back is right up against a wall behind me from where I'm shooting this well actually I'm right there but where the camera was I couldn't get it back any farther I'm at 18 millimeters here I could have used a more wide angle lens and got closer but you'll get more distortion on the edges of the image and that wouldn't have worked because you know they're jam-packed in here this is straight from the camera so it hasn't been cropped in at all and so there's people's faces that are right near the edge of the frame and they would have got distorted and that wouldn't have worked very well at all here's some shots of my good friends Rob and Katherine and their son this one here is straight out of the camera with no cropping or editing in a lens like this works great you know when you're out and about in daylight and you don't maybe with an on-camera flash but it also works really well in a studio situation where we're using off-camera flashes or strobes in this particular case I'm using several speed lights and strobes to get these shots of my buddy Todd and this is a good friend Josh here my daughter Ella shot with the same lens with a couple of off-camera speed lights and then the next couple of shots are team photos that I did if my kids wrestling team and this was all shot at 50 millimeters now sure I could have used a prime for this but is much more convenient and easy to do the setup and get the composition in framing really quickly with this standard zoom lens when you're dealing with a bunch of young kids you have to move quickly and so the standard zoom worked out really well here's a shot that I snuck using another photographers strobe and I did this at the New York State wrestling championship my daughter is the one all the way to the left she got fourth place here but I took this again using the same lens so this lens works really great for a variety of shots landscape architecture and even some portraits this is a recent photo that I did and I used in another course for tuts plus and I shot it with my son Lincoln here playing the piano but this was again at 50 millimeters which is a great focal length for shots just like this vast majority of the standard zoom lenses in use our kit lenses that you'll often see bundled with many DSLRs or mirrorless cameras some of these kit lenses are just okay like this lens right here which came with my very first DSLR this is an 18 to 55 millimeter F 3.5 to 5.6 standard zoom lens these just-okay lenses are usually made at the lowest possible price but still achieve acceptable performance these lenses are capable of producing decent quality images but do have some limitations when stopped down they usually perform a little bit better even though they may be a little bit soft in the edges and corners Center sharpness can often be quite good if you are limited on funds or you are someone who normally makes very small prints and okay lens can be quite useful to begin with on the other hand if you want to make large prints shoot with the lens wide open and/or need corner to corner sharpness a just-okay lens would not be a good choice next up on the food chain are lenses that make more extensive use of metals for the internal parts such as gears cams and retaining rings and the lens mounts on these lenses are usually always metal but usually have better focusing motors which result in quieter and faster focusing these quote unquote better lenses usually have a distant scale for focusing and often use internal focusing which is not only faster but also means that the lens doesn't change length during focusing in the front element doesn't rotate the optical quality is somewhat better than the cheaper ok lenses and this shows up in better performance at larger apertures and better edge and corner quality the overall image quality may be improved by using a few special elements such as aspheric s-- or elements made from low dispersion or high index glass these things all add up to the lenses performance but make the lens more expensive to build better lenses generally provide the best value for most photographers the very best lenses are designed with performance in mind and they tend to be quite expensive usually you'll find these lenses with a metal barrel and internal metal components they may be designed to stand up better to hard or professional use and some may include better sealing against dust and moisture canons l-series lenses for example have sealing gaskets at the lens mouths and also have waterproof sealing around at the switches the very best lenses often use multiple elements made of exotic glass and/or expensive optical materials such as flooring they also include a heck of a lot of optical wizardry that makes these the very best lenses that you can buy in terms of performance those who need the very best in terms of performance as well as superior durability often choose lenses that fall within this range the scope of lenses is pretty vast you have OAM lens makers from Canon Nikon Sony Pentax Panasonic Olympus like a sigma fuji film and Samsung and then you also have third-party lens makers such as Sigma Tamron and Tokina as well as many others the other third-party lens makers mostly make prime lenses the main advantage of these third-party lens makers is cost some of the lenses you get from third-party lens makers are nearly as good or better than the OEM version for two-thirds to half of the cost now that you know about standard zooms the range of quality that you can find in the scope of lens makers you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're going to learn all about wide-angle lenses if you need to fit a lot of the world in your shot you want to have a wide angle zoom in your bag in photography a wide angle lens refers to a lens whose focal length is substantially smaller than the focal length of a quote-unquote normal lens this type of lens allows for more of the scene to be included in the image which is very useful for architectural interior and landscape photography where the photographer may not be able to move farther away to compose the image properly another use is when you want to emphasize the difference in size or distance between objects in the foreground and background nearby objects appear very large and objects at even a moderate distance appear to be very small and far away this exaggeration of relative size can be used to make the foreground objects more prominent and striking while capturing expansive backgrounds this is something that we'll explore later in this course again depending on your camera's sensor size you will have some options here for a full-frame camera you are looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of a 12 to 24 millimeter lens for an aps-c you can get down to 10 to 20 millimetres and for a Micro Four Thirds camera you can get down to 7 to 14 millimetres for aps-c and Micro Four Thirds cameras about the widest field of view that you can find not including a fisheye lens it's going to be about a hundred and fourteen degrees for a full-frame camera you can get as wide as a hundred and twenty-two degrees it's worth mentioning that all of the wide-angle focal lengths that I just mentioned are rectilinear lenses a rectilinear lens creates an image where straight features such as walls buildings or lines appear to be straight as opposed to being curved at particularly wide angles however the rectilinear perspective will cause objects to appear increasingly stretched and enlarged especially as they near the edge of the frame this is different than a fisheye lens which dramatically distorts everything but has a freakish 180 degree or more field of view let's check out what one of these wide-angle zooms looks like in action alright in this example we're gonna have some fun with this ultra wide zoom lens this is a Tokina 11 to 16 millimeter F 2.8 lens and on my crop sensor body this is a Canon 7d this is a pretty wide angle lens now it's not the widest you can get but this is the lens that we're going to use for this example it is pretty wide so what we're going to do is we're going to take advantage of that really cool exaggerated perspective with this lens and get it right down on the ground and then I'm gonna call my wife in here and we're gonna stand right in front of it and we're just going to jump in the air and even though we're going to be close to the camera it's gonna look like we're actually farther away because of that exaggerated perspective and that really cool thing that happens when you use an ultra wide-angle lens I'm gonna come over here and set this up here you can see I have two speedlights here and the Sun is actually right over here you can probably see me squinting a good bit and we're gonna use that as kind of a backlight as a hair light and we're gonna try and expose the sky which right now does not have any clouds in it we're gonna try to expose that down to a nice deep blue to do that I'm gonna be right at f11 here and one 250th of a second at ISO 100 so I'm just gonna set this on the ground here and I'm I'm actually gonna use my tripod here as just a as a prop here to just to prop up the front of the lens because this tripod doesn't go this low obviously no tripod goes as low as the ground I could hang this upside down on this tripod but it's just gonna be easier just to set it on the ground for a second so Rachel can you come on in here for me and then jump in your position here and I'll get this set up I'm just gonna try and get the Sun right at the edge of the frame here now leveling this shot is gonna be a little bit tricky because it's just kind of sitting on the ground here but we're gonna give it a shot and see what happens so I'm gonna put this on ten-second timer oops that jump over here alright so that's gonna go solid and then we're gonna jump ready jump that's tricky alright let's check out what this looks like here your hair's on let's just do another one just because ok this time come back here you're gonna jump towards the camera ready in a run and jump ready go Diana okay I look like I'm jumping over him that was a tremendous amount of fun let's check out a few more examples of a wide-angle zoom in action so let me take you through a few more pictures here that I shot with this 11 to 16 millimeter lens you can see I did a few more jump pictures and as interesting as you think it might be to watch this actually was quite difficult to do because I made my kids my oldest daughter Ella and my next oldest Lincoln I made them jump about a hundred times in front of the camera to get you know just a handful of cool shots here but you can see how cool these look with the exaggerated perspective especially as they get really close to the lens this again was the same setup but this time we had a really nice sky to work with we did these in a parking lot about 9:30 at night here here are a couple of playground shots that we did using the same lens and this was really cool because I get right under him and he still looked pretty far away really cool lens to use outside because it gives you just a huge field of view it's really great for getting big skies in your shot and really getting some distance between objects and we also use this lens for some light painting which was very fun to do you know just real basic stuff at this point it was pretty close to 10 o'clock at night so the kids were about ready to go home and you know if we were using a lens with a higher focal length it wouldn't have worked quite as well because we would have had a smaller area to work but a big wide lens like that made it really easy now for interiors I'd say a wide-angle zoom is almost essential because the interiors you just don't have the space to move around and to capture stuff with a nice wide perspective you need a really low focal length lens so all of these were shots of a few local churches in my town did some of the stained glass here and then I got some nice interiors here these three right here I just put on a tripod and I was able to put these together into a pretty nice panoramic with just three in Photoshop you can see that coming up right here when I moved down the street just a little bit and I found this really cool old church that was built I think in the mid 1800s it has some really really nice stained-glass windows I mean you know a lot of times when you're working inside you don't have a lot of space to work with especially you know you might not have enough room to get back but also you can't quite position yourself this shot in particular I wouldn't have been able to get with a higher focal length lens because I couldn't get it close to the mirror there and still get the same perspective in the background I took a few shots and made this really cool panoramic with just three shots from the back of the church but I was able to capture all of these really nice stained-glass windows and you know when you're limited in space having a wide angle lens a wide angle zoom like this is really really cool because it just allows you to capture so much more here's another panoramic and that I shot with just three images now wide-angle zoom is not only for interiors although that's one area where it really shines it's also great for outside check out these few pictures of this giant tree that I found in this really old cemetery this lens in particular this 11 to 16 millimeter yes at 11 millimeters it does have some distortion but corrected it's actually not that bad and you don't really notice it and I couldn't get these shots any other way if I moved back any further I wouldn't have been able to get underneath the tree so it would have looked completely different these wide-angle zooms give you a fantastically wide very unique perspective on the world in front of you now that you know all about wide-angle zoom lenses you're ready to move on to the next lesson well you're going to learn about medium telephoto zooms a medium telephoto zoom lens fills the gap between a standard zoom lens and the full telephoto zoom lens it can be an excellent lens to have if you need a little more reach to your shots in this lesson you will learn about the medium telephoto zoom lenses and see what they look like in the real world at this point I should tell you that long focal length lenses are often informally referred to as photo lenses although this is technically incorrect a telephoto lens specifically incorporates the telephoto group this would include medium telephoto telephoto and super telephoto lenses that said what we are looking at are higher quality lenses that have become popular in the market today coming up in the course we will look at super zoom lenses which go from wide to super telephoto but you trade off image quality if you want something that's a bit better you need to look at lenses that have a more limited range a medium telephoto zoom lens is a lens that has a field of view around ten to thirty degrees on a full-frame sensor this would be a 70 to 200 millimeter lens on an aps-c you'd be somewhere around fifty to a hundred and fifty millimeters and for Micro Four Thirds cameras you'd be around 35 to 100 millimetres or somewhere in that neighborhood there's not really a strict range for these medium telephoto zoom lenses for example we could put this 70 to 200 millimeter lens on an aps-c camera and get most of the range that you would need with a bit more on the long end this is not your typical walking-around lens because at the widest these lenses are pretty tight let's check out what these focal lengths look like in action now the next several photos that we're gonna check out here we're all shot using medium telephoto zoom focal lengths now they all weren't shot with a medium telephoto zoom lens because for an aps-c sized camera there's not a whole lot of strictly medium telephoto zooms available I think there's actually only one it's made by Sigma it's a 50 to 150 millimeter lens for full-frame cameras you'll see 70 to 200 millimeter lenses but for aps-c cameras a lot of times you often have to use lenses that are either slightly wider at one end or slightly tighter on the other end because they don't really make a lot of lenses available that fit the medium telephoto zoom perfectly but all of these were shot with medium telephoto zoom focal lengths a lot of these nice some of the Kazakhstan pictures again these were shot with a pretty crappy quant array 70 to 300 millimeter lens now that's not really a medium telephoto lens that's kind of medium telephoto to telephoto most of the other shots in this series of photos were shot with a 28 to 75 millimeter Tamron f 2.8 lens now on a full-frame camera a 28 to 75 millimeter lens would be pretty close to the standard zoom it's actually right in the same neighborhood as you find most of the standard zoom lenses for full-frame cameras when you put that lens on an aps-c body it occupies the area in between a standard zoom and a medium telephoto lens now the photos that you're looking at are all medium telephoto focal lengths because that's what I searched some of these other photos were taken with the Canon 72 200 millimeter F 2.8 is L Series lens as well but again only the focal lengths that are in between 56 millimeters and about a hundred and fifty six millimeters so they're all in the medium telephoto range and one thing that you notice about these photos is none of them are really wide right I mean you can't take some landscape photos with them and you can take some photos of buildings with them but what you're gonna notice is the angle of view in all of these photos is fairly restricted the ones that look like they're wider you can tell that they are from far away because there's nothing in the foreground and if there is something in the foreground it's going to be fairly out of focus because the focus point in these wider shots is going to be several hundred feet away in some cases but this medium telephoto range is a great people lens you can see all the shots of people look nice their faces look nice and that's something that we're going to discover later on in this course because the medium telephoto focal length so on an aps-c camera that would be 50 to 150 makes people's faces look really fantastic and we're going to prove that in an upcoming lesson in this course now in this group you're also going to see some sports type shots are gonna see some wildlife type shots now a medium telephoto lens is not the typical lens that you think of for why life in sports you think of a telephoto zoom lens for that something that's got some pretty big numbers associated with it but that doesn't mean that you can't use a medium telephoto for that because it's all about your distance away from the subject and for these shots of my kids playing soccer and my kids wrestling and my niece is riding horses which you'll see later in this set this type of lens worked out well because of my distance away from them for the wrestling and the soccer and the wildlife shots I was pretty close to the animals I was pretty close to the action for the horse riding shots you know the horses were obviously a little bit further away but they still fit in that medium telephoto zoom so to capture more of the action a medium telephoto zoom works fantastically all of these photos look a little bit tighter right we're not seeing group shots with an expansive background we're seeing shots with a fairly tight grouping of objects or background elements in the shots because that's what a medium telephoto focal length lens will give you you can see it looks great for portraits this is the ultimate portrait lens this medium telephoto zoom range but at the very end here you can see some really fantastic horse riding shots where we're seeing most of the animal and the rider now if we were to use a telephoto zoom what we'd see is mostly the rider or mostly you know the animal's head it would be much much tighter and I don't think they would have worked nearly as well now that you have an understanding of medium telephoto zooms you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you will learn about telephoto zooms one of the most enjoyable lenses you'll ever use is a high quality telephoto lens these lenses are fantastic for providing isolation of your subject and getting a more narrow field of view in this lesson you'll learn about telephoto lenses and see what they look like in action telephoto zooms pick up where the medium telephoto leaves off in terms of field of view we're looking at lenses that will give us a field of view of around 10 degrees and smaller the reason that there's not a specific number on the low side is because a lot of these lenses pick up from the medium telephoto and go all the way into the super telephoto zoom range which is close to four degrees in smaller field of view in full frame and aps-c sized cameras you'll see focal lengths like 150 to 600 millimeter 200 to 400 millimeter 70 to 300 millimeter and micro four-thirds you'll see lenses like 70 to 200 millimeter and even 100 to 300 millimeter fixed or wide aperture lenses are very expensive most are well over $1000 u.s. and some like the 2 to 400 millimeter are way up there the 2 to 400 millimeter from nikkor is six thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars and the two to four hundred millimeter from Canon is $11,800 us but at least that one comes with a 1.4 X extender the reason that there is such a range of lenses in terms of their focal length is because of the field of view multiplier a 200 millimeter lens on a full-frame camera has a field of view of around 12 degrees which is more in the medium telephoto zoom range if you put that lens on an aps-c sensor now 200 millimeters is about 8 degrees which is on the longer tele range 200 millimeters on a micro four-thirds camera is closer to 6 degrees field of view the point is that we're looking for lenses that have higher focal lengths to give us that narrower field of view whatever lens you're going to use in this range you almost certainly want to have image stabilization the higher the focal length is the more important this becomes image stabilization will not help you stop action but it will help you to reduce camera shake for shooting photos of still life or slower moving objects image stabilization can be your very best friend these lenses are most associated with sports and wildlife photography as such I don't own one of these longer lenses if I need to shoe a little bit more tele I would use the long end of this 72 200 millimeter on my aps-c camera body let's check out what a telephoto zoom lens looks like in action so the next several images that we're gonna be looking at we're all shot in the telephoto focal range now they all weren't shot with a telephoto zoom lens because I don't have a specific telephoto zoom lens but I do have several lenses that cover that area so all the shots that you're looking at were shot at around 150 millimeters and above not much above 300 millimeters and you can see that I have some wildlife shots in here and you know a telephoto zoom you most often associate with wildlife and sports photography I'm not really a sports guy but I do have a few nice wildlife shots in here but it's a good lens for lots of different stuff here you can see some mountain shots and a few other nice shots that I found from my trip to Kazakhstan several years ago if you're shooting outside and you have a lot of light you can get away with a variable aperture telephoto zoom lens you know you're shooting it f six-point-three f/8 f/11 that's all fine most of these shots you can see there's still a reasonable amount of depth of field where we're getting some isolation of the subjects and because all of these are telephoto zooms you're going to see that in almost every single photo you know super fast lens would obviously be better but at focal lengths of 300 millimetres unless you're using a prime lens you're not going to find a whole lot faster than F 4 F 5 F five point six view use a prime lens then you can get down to F 2.8 you're gonna have a good bit more out-of-focus areas in front of and behind your subject which will help to provide more isolation but a 300 millimeter prime zoom lens is a huge chunk of change and it's a massive lens but this is a really fantastic focal range because it provides such a narrow field of view and it provides really great isolation not only from your subject to the background but also the general environment none of these shots would have been possible with a wider focal length lens because the field of view is just too wide we'd get more background stuff we get more foreground stuff we just get more stuff and the fact is that these type of photos with a telephoto zoom lens give you a tremendous amount of isolation and they just can't be done with a wider focal length lens now here we're looking at several shots that I did of a state show my two nieces my brothers two daughters were in this show and I was probably sitting maybe 50 rows back so maybe a hundred or 150 feet back I was using the Canon 72 200 F 2.8 is lens most of these shots were at 200 millimetres so that is definitely in the telephoto zoom range and that worked out really well now could I have used a little bit more on the telephoto end of that lens sure I definitely could have because I was trying to get you know expressions but also capture a little bit of the surroundings and some other people but the fact is unless I was using a prime that would be very difficult because I was already shooting every single one of these shots at F 2.8 ISOs between 800 and 6400 and if I was using a variable aperture telephoto zoom lens we'd be looking at f5 at 5.6 on the longer end and that would not have worked very well especially with my camera the Canon 7d because that camera will go up to ISO 12800 some of these shots were wide open at ISO 6400 so if I was using F 5.6 with a variable aperture lens we'd be talking about ISOs of 25600 my camera doesn't even go up that high but even newer cameras that do have that that's going to be pretty noisy already 6400 is going to be fairly noisy but 25,000 is going to be crazy noisy now we're checking out a few portraits that I shot of my oldest - Ella and Lincoln you've seen them before in the course we're gonna be looking at what focal lengths are best for making people's faces look fantastic later in this course and the more telephoto range does not make people's faces look the best but depending on how far you are away from them it can work really well to give some really fantastic isolation against the background and also shots like this you know there's a really cool moon shot and it is cropped in a fair amount but that shot would be impossible with anything else but a telephoto zoom or something in the telephoto range now there is something very important to note with a telephoto zoom lens or any really long lens you know a lot of folks will think that a telephoto zoom lens is really great for being able to capture things that are far off in the distance and in some respects they are because this shot that we're looking at here was captured and about a quarter mile away the problem is when you're shooting objects that are that far away which you definitely can you are going to have other issues that are going to affect the image quality and those are atmospheric effects okay moisture in the air the air temperature the air distortion from heat currents we're gonna check out a 100 percent crop of this image and what you're gonna see is that it looks okay small but when you're looking at it close-up it's actually pretty distorted now I was shooting on a day that was probably in the 80s Fahrenheit and so it wasn't crazy hot but even on a relatively warm day we were getting a lot of heat distortion now some of this distortion was coming from the air currents moving up from the roof itself because they're sitting there baking in the Sun all day but if you look at the roof it's all kinds of Ripley and I promise you that's not the lens that we're looking at that is the air distortion that we're getting from this field that was in front and the air currents and the distortion that's happening from the Sun beating down and things of that nature so it is something that you want to take notice of and keep in mind because at some point at some distance the Atmos Aric conditions will affect your image much more than any kind of deficiencies in the lens itself at a certain distance and this will depend on the temperature and the moisture in the air you are going to have issues shooting through more atmosphere to get to your subject but that aside a telephoto zoom lens is a fantastic lens for capturing all kinds of really great shots with that really super narrow field of view now that you have an understanding of telephoto zooms you're ready to move on to the next lesson or you're going to learn about super zooms if you only had one lens to take with you on vacation it should be a super zoom super zooms have an incredible range from the wider angle to the super telephoto but they can suffer from image quality issues in this lesson you will learn about super zooms and find out what you need to know about using one super zooms are the ultimate in travel lenses because they cover such a wide range of focal lengths for full-frame cameras you will see lenses around 28 to 200 millimeters or maybe 28 to 300 millimeters for aps-c you'll find lenses that are in the neighborhood of 18 to 270 or 16 to 300 in micro four-thirds you'll see lenses like 14 to 140 or 14 to 150 millimeter all of these lenses have very similar field of views which go from fairly wide to telephoto and super telephoto ranges with this outstanding range comes some serious trade-offs most of the long-range zoom lenses have a variable wide apertures some start with a reasonably fast F 2.8 or F 3.5 at its widest setting but by the time it reaches the telephoto range you're at F 5 point 6 or higher long range zoom lenses may deliver acceptable optical performance for hobbyists and the casual shooter but it probably will not satisfy advanced users these optical defects are more prevalent at the longer focal lengths because higher magnification also magnifies the lenses imperfections that being said sometimes you don't have space in your bag for several lenses or perhaps the budget isn't there for lenses to cover the same focal lengths if this is the case a super zoom lens might be the right lens for you let's check out what a super zoom looks like in action so the next several images that we're gonna be checking out we're all shot with a Tamron 18 270 millimeter variable aperture image stabilized lens and give you an idea of what this lens is capable of this is shot on the wide end and this is shot at 270 millimeter so you can see that this lens has a ridiculous focal range so what I did is I went out a couple of days and I only shot with this lens I got just a bunch of different stuff here's some fields and some countryside images and this lens is really really great for this you know it's not the sharpest lens it has a variable aperture it has more distortion because of that ridiculous focal range that it has it's still a pretty decent lens to have in your kit especially if you only have one lens to take around with you it's super convenient and very very fast to deploy and to start shooting images we're gonna look at a bunch of images that I shot in an old cemetery and this was a great lens to have you know some of the shots I got out and I set up but a whole lot of these other shots as I was driving around this 100 Acre Cemetery I just shot right out of my car right out of the driver's side window you know if you were gonna take one lens with you on the trip on vacation this would be the lens that you want to have in your bag a super zoom lens is a great option it gives you a tremendous amount of variation in the shots that you can get and you'll see a few in this series that I changed my position and I changed my focal length on the lens to compose the shot so that it was very similar you can see how a lens like this can give you a lot of options in how you're composing your images again a super zoom lens he's not going to be the highest quality optic that you're going to put on the front of your camera when you're shooting inside it's going to be more problematic because of the amount of light that's let in your camera because of that variable aperture none of them are very fast at all this particular lens starts at F 3.5 and it goes down to 6.3 at the super long end and you'll see a lot of lenses like that in the same range are going to be very very similar I took this lends to the zoo with my family and you can see I captured a lot of really nice images I could get in and get some nice tight shots at the animals and I could go wide when I needed to you know now all of these are shot at the super long end a lot of these are in the middle and wide as well but again inside even with some skylights I was shooting at ISO of two thousand and four thousand because it's just not a very fast lens outside when there's more light this definitely works a lot better it allows you to get down to f/8 which improves the sharpness a good deal especially when you're at the long end of the lens stopping down one or two stops can really improve the sharpness and the vignette encana kit great shots with this type of lens I find this lens one of the most fun lenses to have because I can travel light I don't have to carry a lot of kit and it works for a lot of stuff I don't mind shooting at higher apertures f/8 f/11 even at the more telephoto focal lengths that does not bother me at all because when you're at you know above 200 millimetres Fe depending on your distance away from your subject is still going to give you that nice out-of-focus background that you like so a super zoom lens gives you just a whole bunch of options and it's a great all-around lens to have now if you were only going to get one lens I probably wouldn't recommend a super zoom lens I would recommend a standard zoom lens because you're gonna get something that's faster you know you probably should be in the F 2.8 neighborhood and it's going to be sharper at those wide open apertures less optical distortion but if you're looking for a lens to take with you on a trip on a vacation or you're looking to travel really really light when space is limited a super zoom lens is definitely the way to go now that you understand the flexibility and quality you can expect from a super zoom lens you're ready to move on to the next chapter in this course in the next few lessons we'll be going over the zoom lenses faster lighter sexier but more annoying cousin the prime lens prime lenses are another great tool to have in your kid but it's not the right tool for every situation in this lesson you'll learn about what makes primes great and why you might want to leave them at home so as we talked about earlier in this course a prime lens is a lens that has one focal length only they come in focal lengths ranging from wide angles to tell a photo after all this talk about zooms why would you want to bother with a prime first let's talk about why primes are a good option one of the best features in a prime lens is the larger maximum aperture in general prime lenses are faster than zoom lenses this is slowly changing as zoom lens improvements continue to be made by manufacturers but in general the faster wider aperture offered by prime lenses will allow you to shoot in lower light without the need of a flash next on the list is quality while zoom lenses have been getting much better in the quality Department prime lenses are known for being high quality and having the ability to produce great images with less Distortion it makes sense that a tool designed to do just one job is going to be better than a multi-tool now this is not a blanket statement all primes are not superior to all zooms just like everything else there are some Prime's that are extraordinary in some that look kind of muddy looking another factor is price prime lenses are generally simpler in terms of construction because they have less moving parts as a result they're generally less expensive not all Prime's are cheap in fact some of the pro lenses cost a small fortune but there are some excellent values to be had out there one great example are the nifty 50 lenses or 50 millimeter prime lenses particularly from Nikon or Canon weight is another factor to help the case for primes because of their simple construction prime lenses are generally smaller and lighter than zoom lenses in similar focal lengths now for the other side working against primes is portability a single high-quality zoom will cover several prime lens focal lengths this means that you only have to carry one lens instead of several lenses to have the same focal length range you also never have to change your lens in risk getting dust on your image sensor price is something that works against primes as well zoom lens might be more expensive than a prime lens but the cost of multiple lenses to cover the same focal lengths can often be the same or more one of the biggest arguments for zooms is flexibility they allow the shooter an array of focal lengths the ability to quickly change perspective and add variety into their shots within moments for many types of photography this is the way to go including weddings and sports in these situations you may not have time or ability physically to move closer or further away to your subject my thinking is this if you're just getting into photography or you are looking to build out your kit spend money on high quality zooms this is especially true if you have a newer higher-end camera body with exceptional noise performance many fast zooms are around F 2.8 if you get a prime lens that's F 1.4 that's going to be 2 full stops faster but you might just be able to push up the ISO to the same level without any trouble on the other hand if you're shooting with an older camera body a prime can be a great way to get some really fast clean images there are also some very good values out there in the 28 30 50 85 and 100 millimeter prime lenses if you use your camera for video you may appreciate prime lenses with a manual focus only manual focus only lenses are much nicer to use in the video realm manual focus rings on photo lenses only travel about 45 to 60 degrees which makes them very fast for auto focusing but very awful for focusing for video manual focus only lenses have a dampened focus ring so it has some resistance which makes it really nice for following the action and the throw is a lot longer than you'll find on photo lenses which makes following your subjects and tracking focus much easier without missing your mark if you're not in the video these manual focus only lenses will probably be more annoying than any else unless you're in a studio situation and you're doing a lot of critical focusing in that case you might want to use the manual focus anyway even on a photo camera to make sure you're getting exactly what you need to be in focus now that you know about prime lenses you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're gonna learn about a very interesting prime lens the fisheye there are several specialty lenses that we could talk about but I think that the fisheye is definitely one of the coolest in this lesson it you're going to learn about fisheye lenses and see what they look like in action a fisheye lens is a ultra wide-angle lens that produces a strong visual distortion intended to create a wide panoramic or hemispherical image fisheye lenses achieve extremely wide angles of view by forgoing producing images with straight lines of perspective or rectilinear images opting instead for a special mapping which gives the image a characteristic convex non rectilinear appearance the picture angle produced by these lenses only measures a hundred and eighty degrees when measured from corner to corner these have a 180 degree diagonal field of view while the horizontal and vertical fields of view will be smaller you'll find fisheye lenses in zooms and primes the one I have with me here is a prime and it's quite inexpensive I believe it's made by a company called samyang and rebranded by several other companies this one happens to be Vivitar one of the things that I like about this lens is the exaggerated perspectives that it gives this particular lens is manual focus but because this lens has such a huge depth of field it isn't too hard to deal with let's check it out so we're gonna check out some images here that I shot with that seven millimeter vivitar lens on my Canon 7d these are some shots that I did in New York City and are shooting inside the car and what's really cool about this is I jammed it Webb in the windshield and this shot in particular because the way I'm pointing the camera if you look at the building on the upper left-hand corner of the frame that's actually behind me is really weird if you think about it that's behind the card that I'm in and you can see it really really strange but that's what a fisheye lens will give you we're gonna check out a handful of shots here that I did at the beach and what's interesting is some of these shots don't have that characteristic hyper distorted fisheye look to them it really depends on what you're shooting the distance you are away from any immediate objects in the foreground and if there's a horizon in the shot where the horizon is as long as the horizon is near the center of the lens it looks fairly normal as soon as the horizon line gets above or below that area things start looking weird I mean that you can obviously tell that there is an incredible amount of distortion but the beach line or in front of me doesn't look that distorted so if you compose your shots carefully you can make them look wide but not super distorted now depending on where the objects are in your scene you know as you get really close to this lens if fisheye lens exaggerate the perspective and the spatial placement of objects in a very very extreme way which you'll see in a few images coming up here it's very interesting what you can get a lot of times when you're shooting with a fisheye lens depending on the direction that you point it you'll end up getting yourself in the shot which is kind of an interesting and fun effect now in this next image here you can see that my sister's arm that's my sister Lisa on the left there and the arm in the center of the frame that's her arm but it looks like somebody else's arm yeah that's because it was really really close to the lens and so it's giving this really freakish kind of giraffe neck effect to her arm now in this shot what I want you to notice here is the size of my daughter Lily's legs who's sitting on the left there and the building right behind her because I'm gonna change positions in just a second and you're gonna see a huge shift in the size of her legs but you won't see a big shift in the size of the background elements or really anything else now her legs look more normal in fact she looks smaller but everything else looks kind of the same as there's some really cool effects that you can do with this lens and it's a super-fun lens to have and to be able to shoot with you can see here's a shot of my mom which does look wide and a little bit distorted but check out what happens when she's on the edge of the frame now things look like a weird alien world and that's one of the things that you have to watch out for when you're shooting with this lens you can see here I caught the corner of this building and it's like a real obvious sign of distortion but as it took a few more steps now you can see that that looks a little bit more normal now it's still not right but it does look a little bit more normalized so you can use this distortion for an effect to help images look interesting this image example works really well for a fisheye lens because we have this big circular object this image right here it's doing a really cool thing with my daughter's arm and it's kind of exaggerating the length there now this shot here I shot on a rollercoaster in Walt Disney World in the Magic Kingdom and I had a fisheye lens on my Canon 7d at arm's length which is not an easy thing to do on a roller coaster I promise you but a shot like this is just about impossible to do with any other lens because they're just not wide enough to get this really cool effect we're seeing the whole train behind me some really cool sky and I'm seeing myself my son my daughter and my father-in-law there so the interesting thing with a fisheye is unless you're super close to something in the foreground and depending on how you compose the image you can make it look fairly normal and we're gonna look at how to deficient for the distortion somewhat later in this lesson here's another shot where I got myself in the frame you can see my body is in the lower left-hand corner and the has kind of a really weird looking effect but you can see depending on what's in the shot some of these shots don't look that fishy and some of them definitely do it has to do with where the horizon line is where kind of objects that have a lot of straight lines are in their distance away from the lens there's no magic formula you can see some images like this work really well for a fisheye lens because it's working with the distortion there was kind of this rounded canopy on the Dumbo ride here which looked really cool with a fisheye lens other times you're gonna see drastic amounts of distortion in the curved parts of the image but again fisheye lenses are very unique because they offer a super wide perspective that you can't get with any other lens even a super wide angle lens it's just not going to happen they work really well for interiors especially when space is limited because you can really get a lot of stuff in your shot now the next few shots that we're gonna see we're taken during a storm I took these at about 1:30 in the evening and this is another great example of how to use a fisheye lens because I wanted to get a lot of sky and you don't know where lightning is going to be so it's kind of you point at where the lightning generally is happening and hopefully you catch some lightning now I was pretty lucky that I caught some really cool streaks of lightning and what I found out is a few days later we had another wicked storm in the exact position that I'm standing in right now was hit by a tree there was a tree that's about 10 feet to my left and it got hit by lightning it's split in half and it landed where I was standing just on a week prior but if you're going to go out and shoot pictures of lightning and storms and you have a lot of sky that you want to capture a fisheye lens is a great idea for capturing those images here are a few very interesting shots that I did on the fourth of July trying to get some fireworks now I had the exposure tweaked just right so I got a really nice kind of blue sky and I even captured some stars poking through which is really neat fisheye images look cool just as they are but other times you may want to deficient and try to bring back some of the more natural proportions you can get some of the way they're in Adobe's Lightroom and probably aperture but there's a free program that can make some more extrema Corrections let's check it out all right what we're gonna look at in this example is how to deficient so I'm here in Adobe Lightroom and we're looking at one of these shots here that I did inside this church in my hometown here and in Lightroom we do have some basic lens correction you can see I'm in the development module down here in lens Corrections we can set up an able profile Corrections and then down here we can try to set it to auto but because I'm using this particular lens this manual fisheye lens if we pull up the info you can see it thinks it's a 50 millimeter so that's not gonna work what we need to do is we're gonna have to pick a lens make that's pretty close to the same mapping as our lens here at least for this particular lens if you're using a lens that is listed in here then it's going to be a little bit easier for you but for this particular lens there is nothing that matches exactly there isn't a Vivitar rebranded samyang fisheye lens profile so what I found that works okay is one of the Sigma and it's off the screen here so I'm going to select Sigma one of the Sigma lens profiles gonna scooch this down here so we have a little bit more room and right here you can see we have a big old list of lenses to choose from now right up at the very top which you can't see it's off the screen I do apologize for that we have four point five millimeter now that's obviously gonna be way too much now down here we have this distortion slider so we can affect the amount of distortion and so there may be a point right here that will match but what I've found is I believe it's the ten millimeter this actually does a pretty good job of straightening this image out now if we look towards the edges what it's going to do is it's going to stretch this pretty significantly in order to make it fit now that's okay especially if you're gonna be outputting a slightly lower res file but check out what that did to the room I mean before you were looking at this and now we have something very very straight and the interesting thing about this is this photo was taken with the fisheye lens this guy right here was taken with the 11 to 16 millimeter lens and it was on 11 millimeters but just check out the difference this is a good bit wider we can see more of the windows right I mean we can see the wall way behind here this is much wider and we're getting much more of the room in our shot here so even though it is a little bit kind of distorted in the way it's correcting it we are getting something that we just can't get with another wide-angle lens which is pretty cool again this is the 11 to 16 millimeter image and this is not cropped you can see it's full res and this is the same exact spot with the 7 millimeter fisheye on my Canon 7d which is pretty cool now the one issue of doing the lens profile Corrections in Adobe Lightroom is that for JPEG photos like this guy right here you can see this is a JPEG and this is a r2 which is the raw file format these don't have the same lens profile options compared to when you're working with a raw file you can see that I have a pretty short list here and if I look on the drop down normally what you'll see is these guys right here the 4.5 to the 15 millimeter and none of these work quite right if I pick the 4.5 and I reset the distortion you can see that's obviously bananas 15 millimeter not gonna do it even if I try and over correct it it's still not exactly right because the mapping is not quite right now you do see that there is a Sigma 10 millimeter F 2.8 exd C fisheye HSM lens on here and that's because I did a little bit of hackery and let me show you how I did that now this is the Windows version of this hack and I believe there's a similar workaround to do it if you're running a Mac basically in Windows we have to have hidden files and folders enabled to do that we come over here to folder and search options and then in view we have to have show hidden files folders and drives enabled because the folder that we're looking for is called program data and we jump in here we see a bunch of gobbledygook then we come down here to the Adobe file we jump into Camera Raw in lens profiles in 1.0 and then down here because I know the lens that I'm looking for I want to basically copy this folder right here this Sigma folder and so what I did is I copied that and then we jump back to the C Drive and I go into users select your username under app data roaming Adobe and we jump down here to Camera Raw lens profiles and then in here we paste that folder so we paste that folder in here and then what we want to do is we right-click on it we go to properties and we uncheck read-only and we apply changes to folders and subfolders yadda yadda yadda and that goes through and that way we'll be able to make changes we go in here and what I'm looking for because I'm shooting on a Canon camera so I'm looking for this Canon folder here and then what I do is I find the right file okay and that's right here okay and what I want to do is I want to open this now if you haven't opened one of these dot LCP files it's going to ask you what you want to open it with I just selected WordPad okay just a basic text editor because what I need to do is do a find and replace okay and so the thing you're looking to find is this actually right here St camera camera raw profile equals and before you modify it I'll show you will open up another one here this guy right here before you modify all of these we'll say equals true and there's a whole bunch of these and all we have to do is do a find and replace which I've already done right here and we pasted in we take this which will be true we find that and we replace it with the same thing but instead of we replace it with false we go ahead and replace all of those weary save the file and then when we open Lightroom back up we will have this enabled for us to be able to use it's now in the profile for JPEGs otherwise for whatever reason those lens profiles are not accessible when you're working on JPEGs now I don't recommend shooting JPEGs but at some point in your photography career you may have shot only jpg before I know certainly I have if you're working on JPEGs you may not have that available so that is a little hack that you can do and now you can basically adjust the amount of distortion that you have available to you you know you can turn it down but this one this Sigma 10 millimeter works really well with this particular lens and you're gonna have to experiment and find out what works for your lenses again here's another shot I take it off you can see definite fisheye right these lines right here super curved with it on check that out straight lines straight lines straight lines now it does look weird because it makes this roof look gigantic but the lines of perspective are cleaned up now if you don't want to do this kind of hackery there is another option we can use another program now this program is called huge in hu GI n it's free it's open source it's available for Mac Windows Linux and this is a panorama stitcher but we're going to use it to D fish our image so I'm going to jump to the load images and I'm going to load up an image here and I'm gonna pick the same file that we were working on here which is the same file here that we were working on in Lightroom so what we want to do once we load the image is we want to set up a few settings now initially what's happening is it's going to read the metadata and it's going to look at the focal length which it thinks is 50 but that's because the camera recorded the wrong metadata so what we want to do is we want to choose 7 because it's a seven millimeter lens and then the lens type is not rectilinear whoa and you see that's going to get all kinds of weird there don't worry about that we're gonna fix that and then we have to pick one of these mappings and the one that works best for this particular fisheye lens and you're gonna have to experiment with your lens is stereographic now this doesn't look right we have these sliders here and we can kind of move the field of view up so we can see what in the heck is going on you can see that this is doing the wrong thing to our image but don't worry we're gonna jump over here to the projection tab and we're gonna change this from equirectangular to rectilinear and now you're gonna see that this is actually doing something that's far more pleasing now it's bending the image at the proper way because we're taking the lens type which is stereographic and then we're projecting that so that it's rectilinear which means we're basically going to be fish this we're gonna straighten out the lines now you may have to play around with the settings in order to get the right look for this for example seven millimeters does not look right and actually I think the lens that I was using is labeled seven millimeters but I think it might actually be closer to 7.5 millimeters and you will see maybe a small change here the code of projection yeah you see that's looking a little bit better seven millimeters this line here was kind of looking like an arc and that's not right and then if we expand this all the way out you can actually see how it's stretching the image kind of in this star shape here but obviously we don't want all of that data so we can use these sliders here to crop in on the image because we don't really need all this jazz we can crop it in right to the black there essentially and then over here in projection we have kind of more finite control you know we can say 150 that's not right how about 149 that looks about right and 110 maybe nope I guess it's 109 you can crop it smaller than this if you want but that's up to you then all we have to do is save this out and to do that I'm going to go over here to view panorama editor I'm going to jump over to the stitcher tab and then we're just going to say stitch because this is a panorama stitcher and we want to stitch it together it's gonna say the project needs to be saved yada yada yada and I'm going to save it and then it's going to stitch it together so this is the original image okay and if we we bump in here we can see there is some chromatic aberration you know not a huge deal this is the corrected image but if we bump in here we can see but it is being stretched but it's being stretched in a somewhat pleasing way and you know this probably could be cropped in on the top and bottom a little bit more because this bottom stuff way down here is stretched pretty significantly I don't think that's extremely useful plus if we were to print this you know I'm not sure that that's all necessary there but it just goes to show you we do have options and this image right here looks very similar to what we get here in Adobe Lightroom this is doing just a different kind of lens correction you know there's not one that's necessarily better but you can see this is definitely doing a nice job now we may have overshot the mark a little bit we might have been able to go down to maybe eight millimeters we can actually see what that looks like we can jump back here and we'll go to this it's a eight millimeters so actually that is looking a little bit different we can save this out again as it as another version this is the first one that we corrected you can see that might be a little bit bendy there but this guy right here this is the second one when we selected eight millimeters and you can see this actually looks very very similar to what's happening in Lightroom here they're very very similar but the cool thing about huge in or Huijin who in hu GI n however you pronounce it is that we have a little bit more to work with on the top and bottom of the image where Lightroom just kind of crops it out you can see that that stuff is there but it sort of just crops it out you know I mean this stuff is stretched but it's not like this down here which is pretty heavily stretched I actually like the way that this handles the correction it involves a couple extra steps but I think it works really really well so just another option there for you you have the hacking of Lightroom if you're working on JPEGs if you're working on Raw's then you will have lots of lens profiles to choose from hopefully you can find one that is a good match you know not all of these will work I find the Sigma 10-millimeter works really really well for this lens I think that looks really pretty nice we would be able to save a little bit more if we were to do this in pujan but you have some options there now that you know what fun a fisheye lens can be you're ready to move on to the next chapter in this course in the next few lessons you will learn how we can use focal lengths to make someone look their best and how we can use focal length and perspective to recompose images you can take a photo of anything you like with any lens but the results may vary and sometimes they're just plain unsettling especially when you're shooting people in this lesson you'll see where the sweet spot for focal length is when you're shooting people so this lesson in the next few lessons will deal with focal length or field of view and perspective when we talk about perspective in photography we are referring to how the subject or scene looks from a particular spot in order to change perspective we cannot simply zoom in or zoom out because we're still standing in the same spot what we need to do is move from one spot to another one in this example we're going to look at what happens to the human face when we use different focal lengths and then change perspective to compose the shots so that the face is roughly the same size in all the images let's check it out alright we're going to take a look at a quick little demo here and what we're going to look at is how focal length and field of view affects the human face so what we have going on here in the background and have my beautiful wife Rachel she's going to be helping us out modeling today I have a couple of speed lights in octave boxes there on stands but you can see real basic stuff on my camera here my Canon 7d I have a Tamron 18 to 270 millimeter superzoom now this isn't the best lens to do headshots or portraits with but it'll be really fast and convenient so we can see a lot of different focal lengths all at once without having to change lenses normally I would throw the 72 200 on here and probably shoot these but we're going to experiment and see what different focal lengths look like on the face so real quick camera settings here I have this set to manual one two hundred and fiftieth of a second I have both flashes set to manual and they're looking pretty good so I don't have to worry about that what I'm mostly going to be focused on is changing the focal length and then moving around to recompose the face to be about the same size in all of these shots now what I'm gonna try to do is you can see which focus points I'm using here right I'm only using five that are right in the center so it's the center one the one above below into the right into the left and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna line up the center one right on Rachel's nose and then I'm gonna line the one just below it on her mouth and that way I'm going to try and keep the size of her face about the same in all these pictures so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start on the widest this lens goes is 18 now we don't really need to do a fisheye because you could imagine that we already looked at fisheye lenses it's gonna make the face look pretty wacky and already 18 you're gonna see in just a minute that the face is not going to look its best but we're gonna do the big focal length changes that are marked on this lens so I'm gonna do 18 millimeters 35 millimetres 50 70 100 200 maybe 150 I'll kind of guess at where that is and then 270 which is as high as this ghost so I'm gonna get rid up there and we're gonna start at 18 millimeters and see what this looks like all right so we're gonna start at 18 millimeters here and 18 millimeters is gonna be right up in her face and we're just gonna rip right through all the focal lengths here so 18 millimeters good all right 35 millimeters move them back just a little bit good all right 50 millimeters here we go good 70 millimeters is going to be pretty close hundred millimeters all right 150 millimeters it's not marked on here I'm just gonna guess where it is 200 millimeters gonna move back a little bit more all right and 270 millimeters move back just the hair great so let's take a closer look at these images if we start off by looking at the 18 millimeter focal length you're gonna notice that it doesn't look right and this is because of what happens when you use a wide-angle lens like we have mentioned before throughout the course a wide-angle lens exaggerates the relative size of foreground objects and makes background objects more distant looking well in the face what happens is the most well in the face the thing that's closest to the foreground or the thing that's closest to the lens is the nose so what happens is the nose ends up looking kind of unsettlingly large right unnaturally large compared to the rest of the face and it makes the back of the head where the hair and the ears are look smaller now as we move up from 18 to 35 millimeters you're gonna see that there's a big difference and check out what happens to the nose and the back of the head right what its gonna look like is the nose is going to push into the face and the hair is going to be come bigger now I promise you she did not fluff her hair between these two shots but 18 millimeters we can't actually see the part of the hair that we can see at 35 millimeters because we're too close now as we move up I tried to hit 50 millimeters actually hit 59 millimeters but 59 and 50 is pretty close so you can see between 35 and 59 there's another kind of compression thing that happens here as well the nose definitely gets smaller particularly if you look at the nostrils here they look like they're settling down in her face the hair again looks bigger you see more of the hair as we go from 59 to 77 here we're gonna see another little shift right it's not drastic but there's going to be another little shift and nose looks a little bit smaller the hair is looking slightly larger we're seeing more of that back of the head hair as we go to 100 millimeters again the hair looks bigger the nose is gonna look a little bit smaller and things are starting to look pretty nice I'd say now as we go from a hundred millimeters to a hundred and fifty four millimeters we see that there's another big difference here now this is partially due to the way that she turned her head for this one shot she slightly turned her head and exposed her left side of her face which is flat against one of the softboxes so we're seeing a really flat section of light right here on the left side of her face her right side of the face and this is actually where compression cannot be so helpful because she's exposing the wide side of her face because it's completely flat against the softbox so there's no shading there and it makes that it's your left in her right side of her face look unnaturally wide because there's no fall-off of light there's no shading there there's no dimension there and when you take something that's flat and you compress it it's going to look even flatter so this actually makes her face look a little bit fatter now if she was if she was a little bit more straight on to the camera this would have looked a little bit better but she tilted her head so in this particular case the compression did not work for us but as we go to 218 millimeters you can see she's back towards the camera it's looking a little bit better but at 218 millimeters you are seeing a little bit of weirdness happen right now her face is looking at normally flat now this is partially due to the very flat lighting that we have but also we're seeing the effects of the compression of these higher focal lengths it's making these objects look like they're closer together so it's making her nose look like it's closer to her ears which is basically flattening out her face and as we go from 218 millimeters to 270 millimeters these two focal lengths just look strange now between all of these you're going to see subtle improvements right as we go from 35 to 60 millimeters to 77 millimeters to 100 you'll see slight shifts but you'll see dramatic shifts when we jump back and forth so 35 is the first one that looked reasonable right that one looks okay it's still it's still a little bit wide but if we go from 35 to let's say 77 there's a big difference you're going to see the nose get smaller you're gonna see the face look much nicer the hair is gonna look nice and big and things are gonna be really nice now from 77 to 218 you're gonna see another big jump the face is gonna look much more flat and wide so to my eye the sweet spot for making the face look its best is between 100 millimeters and let's say 35 so 50 millimeters somewhere in there 35 is probably a little bit on the wide side but that's where the face starts looking right when we go to 50 or 60 millimeters we're more in the zone then it's starting to look a little bit better because we're just past that normal focal length right 35 millimeters on a crop sensor camera which I was shooting with is more similar to a 56 millimeter field of view on a full frame camera which is the normal focal length so once you get slightly past here you're gonna see some compression happening as we look around 59 77 100 millimeters that's right where the face is gonna look it's best it makes her nose look nice and small it makes the face look really compressed you know the proportions aren't exaggerated and we're getting a little bit of that compression effect now as we go past there 150 200 and 270 millimeters that's getting into the area where there's maybe a little bit too much compression and it's making the face look abnormally flat now the flat lighting doesn't help if we used you know maybe some more dramatic lighting that may change things up a little bit but I think that you know 270 millimeters is it's just weird looking it makes her face look like a pancake there's just it looks like there's no dimension whatsoever it's just way too flat between the edge of her nose here in her Cheikh in her ear with the earring here at 270 millimeters it just looks like that's all at the same dimension you can't really tell that any part is much closer to the camera than you know any other part so it's way too flat so probably the area you want to stick to is around 100 millimeters to let's say 50 millimeters for making the face look its best now on a full-frame camera we'd be looking at 160 millimeters because on this camera this is a 1.6 x crop factor so 100 millimeters looks similar to a 160 millimeter field of view on a full-frame camera and 50 millimeters look similar to an 80 millimeter field of view on a full-frame camera now if you're on Micro Four Thirds you may want to look at around 50 millimetres to 24 millimetres because of that 2x crop factor but there definitely is a sweet spot two focal lengths in field of view for making the face look its best too wide and it just looks weird too narrow and it just looks too flat now that you know where the sweet spot is for making people look great you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're gonna learn how to use this same idea to compose background in foreground elements differently as you learned in the last lesson higher focal length lenses compress the image and make people's faces look more pleasing to look at this concept is also useful when it comes to composing your shots by controlling how large the background elements are and how much background we see in the image in this lesson you'll learn how to use focal lengths to change the composition of background elements already in this example we're going to be checking out what happens to background elements and how we can recompose those using focal lengths so very similar to what we did in the last example we're gonna be taking a shot of something and keeping the main element about the same size and then we're going to change our perspective so we're gonna move back we're gonna change focal lengths and we're gonna see what happens to the background elements and see how that affects our image what we're looking at right behind me I have this cool old here from the 1830s and behind there we have some trees we have some sky and we have an old brick building so from my current perspective here on my camera I'm using a 17 to 50 millimeter lens and I have it set to 17 millimeters so I'm gonna switch the live view here and get this kind of lined up and in focus I'm gonna use manual focus here because I don't trust my auto focus to get this right then I'm gonna snap a photo I'm gonna put this in two-second delay here just to make sure I don't bump the camera cool so if you take a look at that photo you can see all the elements that I just described now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move back and I'm gonna change focal lengths to something a little bit higher we're gonna check out what happens to the background elements alright so we've moved back probably 25 feet using the same lens but now I'm at 50 millimetres and I've tried to compose this so that the Bell is roughly the same size so I'm going to take another shot here I have the camera set to 10 seconds self timer because I have this column extended because we kind of went downhill a little bit and I'm using the 10 seconds to get out the shake so what you're gonna see between these two images is the size of the background and what's happening in the background is going to change and a little bit in the foreground because we've come back so far now we can actually see the tree that I was standing next to before from this new perspective which is interesting it's something different but more importantly we have different things going on in the background between these two shots what's happening is it's making the space between the Bell and the building look smaller from back here when we use a higher focal length it compresses things so the distance between objects appears to be less than it actually is if you look at the ground between these two shots what you'll see is that there looks like there's more ground between the Bell in the building in the first shot and the size of the building looks bigger in the second shot now the size of the building didn't change but between these two perspectives because we're getting a more narrow field-of-view it changes what's happening in the background the background elements look larger we're going to set up one more shot we're gonna check this out again this time we're gonna shoot in this direction there's a nice gazebo over here so we're gonna set up for that and we're gonna take a look at what's going to happen to the building that's behind the gazebo and it's gonna become more obvious what this does when we change focal lengths to change perspective alright one more example where we're gonna look at this we're shooting at a gazebo here right behind me and I'm pretty close to it here at 17 millimeters and it's mostly filling the frame and what you're gonna see is I'm gonna take a quick shot of this we're getting kind of a backlight kind of sun-dappled thing happening but there's a lot of other stuff happening in this shot there we have a whole bunch of we can see sky we can see the building back there there's a there's a lot of stuff in this shot and I don't think this focal length being super wide is the best so we're gonna move way way back we're going to change lenses probably go to the 70 to 200 and we're gonna try and really compress this to get the gazebo about the same size but you're gonna check out what's going to happen into the background elements okay now we've changed our position I'll put the 70 to 200 on and I'm about I don't know maybe at one fifteen hundred and fifteen millimeters and we're probably maybe 35 40 feet back from where we were and we're getting a completely different shot here I'm gonna set this up I'm gonna take a quick shot here I'm gonna set this to self timer again because I have this column up here I want it to get the shake out especially with a big lens on here it's gonna take a couple seconds for the vibrations to stop so check out the difference between these two shots they look dramatically different even though the gazebo is about the same size they look like they were shot in two completely different locations when we use a wide-angle lens because of the exaggerated proportions that it gives it makes the gazebo look like it's a completely different shape it looks much more angular and pointy and round and it has more depth to it we're on the telephoto lens here at 115 120 millimeter it's much more compressed it looks flatter we can see more of the roof and what's going on behind there is a lot more pleasing we're seeing a lot less sky in fact there's very little sky in the shot so this is a completely different shot and there's not one that's wrong or right but it just goes to show you there's a range of different looks that you can get by moving from your current position to a new one and then changing your focal lengths so you can see how just one focal length to shoot shots like this would be really limiting even the 17 to 50 millimeter lens is not going to quite give us the same perspective we need something much longer to get something like this that's really really flat looking let's take a look at a few more examples of how we can use this shifted perspective and change in focal length to recompose our shots for some very interesting looks so we're gonna take a look at a handful of shots here in all of these example photos I'm changing my perspective so I'm moving back and I'm also changing my focal length so that the main objects in the scene are roughly the same size and what you'll see is the background elements change drastically and we get a little variance in what happens in the foreground now these buildings here we're gonna see a big shift in how close or far apart they look here as I back up and I use a longer focal length it's really cool how we can compress all the buildings together and make for an interesting shot now these last two photos here I shot the wide one is that 18 millimeters and the tight one here is at 35 millimeters and what you'll notice is the trees on the wide shot look like they're further apart the background looks a little bit less dense on the wide shot on the tight shot we're getting a little bit more background filling right we're seeing more of the hill and there's not one of these that's necessarily better than the other one they're just a little bit different we're also seeing the details of the columns on the wide shot look like they're more 3-dimensional we're seeing a little bit more underneath them whereas we go to the tight shot we can't really see that from that perspective so this is a really interesting thing that you can do by changing your position which is changing your perspective and then using your lenses to get a similar composition and he can really get a lot of interesting looks and you can really change up the composition of your shots now that you understand how to use focal lengths and feel the view to your advantage when composing background objects you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're going to learn about macro all lenses have a limit to how close they can focus on an object and on a normal lens this isn't really that close a macro lens can allow you to get close really close in this lesson you'll learn about macro lenses and see how to use them macro photography is extreme close-up photography usually of very small objects in which the size of the subject in the photograph is greater than it is in real life by some definitions a macro photograph is one in which the size of the subject on the image sensor is life-size or greater however in other uses he refers to a finished photograph of a subject at greater than life-size the ratio of the subject size on the sensor plane to the actual subject size is known as the reproduction ratio likewise a macro lens classically is a lens that's capable of reproduction ratios greater than one to one although it often refers to any lens with a larger reproduction ratio magnification describes the size and object will appear on your camera's sensor compared to its size in real life the closer you place your lens relative to the subject the larger that subject will appear in the image there are several lenses that have a macro feature and the amount of image magnification will depend on the lens using a remote switch or shutter release device can also greatly improve the sharpness and control over the macro photos because the camera no longer moves as a result of you pressing the shutter button another option is to set the camera to a ten-second timer as this will give the camera time to settle down and stop moving pressing the shutter button even with the self timer can still have issues because it can potentially nudge the camera in your composition at higher magnification photos will have a correspondingly shallow depth-of-field control over the focus point is much more critical than normal persistent adjustments should almost always be made using manual focus if your lens is really close to the subject you'll have an issue with light as well because the lens will be blocking light from the front of the object in these cases you might want to investigate using a dedicated macro flash that attaches to the front of the lens a pretty inexpensive way to get into macro photography is to use normal lenses and extension tubes an extension tube increases the lenses magnification by an amount equal to the extension distance divided by the lens's focal length for example adding a 25 millimeter extension tube to a 50 millimeter lens will give you a magnification gain of 0.5 X so if the lenses original magnification was 0.15 X then the new magnification will be 0.15 X plus 0.5 X and that'll be 0.65 X let's take a look at an example or in this example we're going to check out how to shoot some macro shots first we're going to check out using some lenses that have a macro capability then we're going to switch over and use some lens tubes and we're going to see what we can get with those as well now first I have set up a Tamron 28 275 F 2.8 lens and this has a macro capability and basically this means that it can focus much closer than a normal lens and if this were on a full-frame camera this would be a standard zoom lens but because this is on a canon 7d it's going to act more like a lens that's in between a standard zoom lens and a medium telephoto lens you can also see that I have my camera set up on a tripod and it's on a device called a focus rail slider and what this allows me to do is get precise control over the focusing because it has a little worm gear so I can precisely adjust the position right and left and back-to-front on my camera and this helps because manual focusing on photographic lenses can be very tricky to do so this device is going to help position the camera which in turn is going to help move the focus point and it's gonna make focusing a lot easier so first we're gonna check out what we can get with this lens and then we're going to switch up lenses and we're gonna check out using some extension tubes I'm in Live View mode what I'm going to do is I'm going to punch in and I'm gonna adjust the focus and make sure it's all set then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put my camera in ten-second self timer mode and that's because with my battery grip on this focusing rail slider on the tripod if I touch it it's gonna want to wobble around a little bit now I could use a cable release mechanism or a remote to fire the shutter but ten seconds should be plenty of time to let the vibrations settle out now the settings that I'm using here I'm in manual mode ISO 100 °f 9 I don't want to go too much past f11 on this camera because that's going to get into diffraction territory and my exposure time is at 2.5 seconds and that seems to be just about right so I'm gonna take a shot here and we're gonna see what this looks like I'm gonna try one more at 1.6 seconds and we'll see what we get basically with this lens that's about the best that we're going to get because this lens is set to 75 millimeters and we're at the closest focusing distance that we can get with this lens we can't get it any closer and get it in focus so if we want a more macro shot if we want something that's closer and have a higher reproduction ratio we're gonna have to use a different lens or change your setup so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change up lenses and we're gonna try this again with a different setup alright now I've switched lenses now I'm using a quant or a 70 to 300 millimeter lens with a macro capability it's not a very good lens but we're gonna check it out and see what we can get with it now in this lens in order to get to that macro capability we have to be between 180 and 300 millimeters then right here on the lens there's a little switch and we can switch it over to macro and when it's a normal mode the focusing stops here but when we switched it over to macro now we have a little bit more focus range to work with so you can see I am gonna have to reposition my camera because the minimum focusing distance is 3.1 feet so I'm gonna pull my camera back and I'm also gonna push my little rolling setup out at 300 millimetres we are getting more of a macro shot here I'm gonna fire off a shot here and see what we get 10 second timer should be plenty of time for the lens to settle down and stop moving nice that's not bad I'm going to switch up what we're shooting at here and see if we can get anything maybe a little bit more interesting I'm gonna try another shot here 3.2 seconds and see what we get very nice now that you can see is pretty close we can see a lot of detail there but again depth of field is really really shallow so that's what a macro type lens will give you but let's switch it up now and let's try an extension tube and see what we can get alright for this example we're going to be using this extension tube and we're going to use my Canon nifty 50 50 millimeter F 1 point 8 lens this is the extension tube that I'm going to be using it's made by fotodiox it's made out of aluminum and this actually comes in a few different parts so what we have is a 7 millimeter a 28 millimeter and a 14 millimeter extension with these we can vary the amount of lens tube extension that we can put on the camera so what I'm going to do is first I'm going to start with the 7 millimeter which isn't gonna be much and as you can see what I'm gonna do is unscrew the back this is the part that's gonna go on the camera it has the camera mount on it I'm going to screw the 7 millimeter with the lens mount on it now this is not a smart lens adapter you can see there's no electronic contacts on the lens what this means is that all electronic communication will be disabled from the lens that's because this is a cheap lens extension tubes and that's just one of the things that you have to deal with but it's not really a big deal because we're gonna manual focus anyway and the only thing left to deal with is going to be setting the aperture now that's going to be a little bit of a trick because we won't be able to physically set the aperture on this lens because it doesn't have a manual aperture control so what we can do is there's a little workaround normally when you are shooting a photo on your camera what happens is when you have press the shutter button the lens stays wide open so it can be very bright while you're composing the image so this is an F 1.8 lens so it's going to stay at F 1.8 right until you take the picture and then right when you take the picture the aperture is going to close down it's going to snap the photo and then it's going to open back up so you can see what you are doing but there's a little workaround that we can do that we can lock the lens at f9 so what I'm going to do is I'm going to press the depth of field preview button on the side of my camera and when I do it's going to put the aperture f9 and all I have to do is take the lens off and then as you can see the lens aperture is locked down to f9 now what I can do is lock this down on the camera now we're all set up at f9 now let's see what we're gonna get with this extender and this lens let's turn the camera back on put it in Live View mode now one problem with this is going to be that it's going to be really dark so we're gonna have to crank up the ISO here so we can see what in the heck we're doing I'm going to recompose this and get it down here and punch you in and get this nice and in focus I'm gonna set the ISO back down I'm gonna take a shot and see what we get now the cool thing about doing this with this prime lens is that it's much sharper than any of the other lenses that I've used for this example this lens in particular is very very sharp and if 9 it's going to capture some pretty cool detail we can see all kinds of really cool scratches and dings and dents on the front of this flashlight but we can increase the macro power even more by adding some more extension tubes so let me hook that up and let's see what that looks like so now I'm using the 7 millimeter extension tube and the 14 millimeter lens extension tube and now we're going to get another little bump here in what we're going to be able to see which is pretty cool I'm also going to drop this down try and get this a little bit more level oh that's too low with the flashlight here very cool all right now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna switch around again and I'm gonna use a full lens tube extension which is the seven millimeter the 14 millimeter and the 28 millimeter extension and we're gonna see what we can get with that all right now what I have is the whole lens tube adapter all built up want to punch in and focus up and focusing is going to be super critical when we're using this much lens tube extension I'm gonna try again and see what we get here alright that's a little bit dark so I'm gonna go for a longer exposure time this time I'm gonna go for six seconds there we go now we're getting somewhere we can see all kinds of really cool detail so you can see that lighting can be a definite problem because as you get this closer to an object it's gonna block some light from hitting the front of the object so you can look at things like a ring flash or a dedicated macro flash these are things that you can buy or you can rent from places like borrow lenses comm we could set up a couple of speed lights and set them off to the side and we're gonna look at some examples in just a few minutes of some images that I took with a few speed lights set up just like that now it's not gonna work to put a speed light on top of your camera because it's not going to be able to get down in front of the lens from that angle it's just no way you're gonna get enough light intensity with your speed light on your camera to get what you're looking for but that just gives you an idea of what you can do with a macro extension tube it's super easy very inexpensive you know we're talking about this macro extension to was under $30.00 this prime lens was like a hundred bucks but you can use this with any lens I could put a standard zoom lens on here and it would have worked just the same the problem is that when you get heavier lenses on a lens tube extension like this it puts a lot of stress on the lens tube extension and on the lens mount because you're putting a heck of a lot of weight way out here I'm not saying that it would break but it's something that I don't really want to chance you know my standard lens is a good bit heavier and it's going to put a lot of stress on the camera body because you're basically making a giant lever so let's check out a few more examples of some macro shots so the next group of examples that we're gonna check out here I shot with my camera just about the same position as you just saw but for the lighting most of these shots were done using two speedlights with some radio triggers and basically I just held them on either side of the camera or for some of these shots I just set them on the table pretty easy stuff and with the speed lights I was able to move the position of the light and get some different lighting looks you can see my bracelet here that I shot two different ways one was with a more strong light coming from the left and this one was kind of equal intensities from left and right you can see I shot a bunch of different things this is a my leather wallet and just check out the detail that you can get I mean it's really pretty incredible we're also gonna look at some stuff that you may find a little bit disturbing this is my finger and there's all kinds of weird stuff in between the ridges of my fingerprint here that you can see and it's just really incredible the amount of detail that you can get with something so simple just a lens extension tube and camera on a tripod see we got an HDMI cable here and you can really see the texture on the gold contacts really cool stuff this is a super old flash that doesn't really look that dirty but on the macro shot it looks like I buried it in the sand I mean it's got so much dust and little hair particles here speaking of hair here's another shot of I believe this is my arm hair here but just check out the incredible detail and you can you can really see the texturing of the individual hairs here and I'm going to check out a bunch of images that I tried to do of my eye now many of these were difficult because I was shooting this by myself and so that's why you saw several of them out of focus but I got a bunch in focus and these shots turned out really really cool you can see the detail in the iris here for some of these I just used one flash at about a 90 degree angle to my face and that really lit up the texture of my eyeball in a really interesting way I tried a few more with two flashes one to the right one to the left just to give a little bit more even exposure and it worked really well but after eighty or so shots I did get about 20 shots that were nice and InFocus with some very cool lighting and he's turned out really cool now that you have an understanding of macro lenses and macro shooting you're ready to move on to the last lesson in this course where we're gonna wrap things up with some final tips thanks very much for watching this course as we have seen throughout this course there is a tremendous variety of lenses available to you that offer a wide range of possibilities I usually recommend getting the very best glass that you can because it will last longer and have better resale value if you ever decide to upgrade in a few years some higher-end Canon and Nikon lenses that originally cost two thousand dollars sell for only a few hundred dollars less than they cost new if you hold on to the lens for let's say four years that's only a few dollars per month another fantastic option for you is renting lenses if you're doing a special shoot or covering an event instead of buying a lens for a few thousand bucks you can rent it for a few days and only pay one or two hundred dollars if you do this a lot it might make sense for you to just buy the lens but if it's only once or twice per year rent it I also like to recommend that you take care of your gear as best as you can good cases for lenses is a must professional lenses can take a reasonable amount of abuse but remember there's a lot of delicate glass in there I like Pelican cases for maximum protection but if you're traveling light that's not going to work whatever you choose make sure that it's well padded and sturdy and it wouldn't hurt to have a rain cover built-in or a plan for keeping your gear dry at the very least remember longer focal lengths make people look better and you can use longer focal lengths to compose your shots outside as well wide-angle lenses have exaggerated perspectives this can work to your advantage and it can work against you zooms offer the most flexibility and are a lot of fun to use super zooms are a nice tool to have but image quality is not that great if you're needing a little bit more speed from a lens check out a prime lens there are some great options out there for Prime's that can be a lot of fun to use I hope that you learned some valuable lessons in this course that will help you take better photos make sure to check out all the other great photography courses on touch plus to expand your skills and stay sharp again my name is Dave bode for tuts plus and we'll see you around thanks for watching you

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 1,188,439

Rating: 4.8305149 out of 5

Keywords: lenses, lens, camera lenses, camera lenses explained, photography, choosing a lens, choosing a lens for dslr, dslr, camera, camera lens, zoom lens, tips, focal length, prime lens, telephoto, wide angle, 50mm, wide angle lens, best lens, photography tips, learn photography, photography tutorial, telephoto lens, photography for beginners, cameras, beginner photography, wide angle photography, zoom lenses, canon lens, lens review, wide angle lens photography

Id: jRvkpa-9Djs

Length: 164min 20sec (9860 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018