Conventional wisdom states your money is better spent on a good quality lens than on the camera body. And for the most part it’s a very good piece of advice - something like the Canon 85mm f/1.2L will produce stunning images mounted on a 1000D body, whereas even a Nikon D3x will struggle to take decent shots with the 18-55 kit lens in anything other than favourable conditions. There is, however an curious anomaly in this trend that occurs at precisely fifty millimetres.

By and large telephoto lenses are easy to design, optically but require some very large [read expensive] elements if you want a fairly wide maximum aperture. In contrast wide angle lenses have to bend light much further and apertures can only be so large without the use of sophisticated [read expensive] optical corrections.

The humble 50mm, once the standard ‘kit lens’ bundled with new SLRs happens to sit at the crossover point. The focal length is long enough to employ a simpler non-retrofocus design, which is tried and tested, with inexpensive elements keeping the manufacturing and assembly cost down. As a result you get a very large maximum aperture and good optical performance for what is relatively little money.

And mounted on a full frame 35mm body the selective focus is sublime…

MG

I am now on twitter so go and add me if you want to know more about what I am up to. I promise I will only post about photography projects, updates and interesting things I come across, not about what I’m eating for breakfast!

Anyone who’s seen my flickr stream and/or blog post knows I’m a big fan of the Orbis ring flash adaptor. They recently held a competition and although I didn’t win I was pleased be in the top 10 - considering the high standard of photos selected! My image (which accompanies this post) along with the other finalists & winner have been added to the Orbis samples gallery here.

MG

I came across “Dave Cross’ Fix it challenge” via Scott Kelby’s blog. Basically each week Dave posts an image in need of some serious retouching, participants fire up photoshop and do their worst, posting the resulting images in the pool from which winner is chosen. I had been on the look out for something to practice my photoshop skills on, and being a highly competitive person I couldn’t resist having a go.

This week’s image is a period photograph of a woman standing in front of a painted background. My immediate thoughts were, on top of fixing the obvious damage, I would attempt to restore the colour that would have been present - had colour film been invented at the time! This is something I’ve not attempted before on a photograph so it’s an ideal learning opportunity. In the end it turned out to be somewhat more challenging than I had expected! What follows is a step by step breakdown of what I did and why I did it…

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The above image was shot during a talk I gave to the University of York photographic society (thanks to Jens for letting me volunteer him for this demo). The topic was light, more specifically how nothing to do with light (and therefore colour) is absolute - it’s all relative.

The rim light coming in from the right has a strong yellow coloured gel in front of it but what if you don’t happen to have a yellow gel handy? Well all is not lost, provided you have a blue gel. By putting a blue gel on main light, the rim light - despite being white* - is yellower than the main light:

White balance is the process of picking an arbitrary point on the spectrum and declaring it to be “white” (something our eyes do without us realising). By choosing the white balance in order to make the blue light white, the colours shift accordingly and we end up with this:

which is surprisingly like the first shot (especially since I grabbed a yellow and blue gel that looked about right, without actually testing!)

Ok, so this isn’t the most useful technique in the world, after all if you one colour gel you’re likely to have others as well! But what about if you can’t gel one of your lightsources, what if one of your lightsources is the sky?

MG

_{*as in the colour of daylight. Residents of another planet would probably have flashes which produce a different colour light as “white”.}

This headshot of Oliver, editor of law journal Ebor Lex, done in a standard meeting room in a very short timescale. I thought it would be an interesting subject for a “stream of consciousness” post showing every shot that was taken during set-up and and trying to explain what was going through my head at the time. This is not supposed to be a perfect example of how it should be done, merely a record of how it was done.

It’s important to have some idea what you’re trying to achieve before you start so I decided I wanted something edgy, like this shot but with a more traditional background. That look was achieved by having a pair of softboxes very close to the subject, angled slightly toward the camera so I started off with the lights in that position.

No light meters no modelling lamps, what follows is exactly what I saw on the back of the camera at each stage…

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