It’s a little-known fact, but if you remove the lens from your SLR and hold it a few centimetres away from your camera you can still take a picture. The technique, known as freelensing, allows you to twist and alter the angle of the lens, which shifts and skews the plane of focus. This can create wonderful painterly effects.
Independent lens maker Sigma has announced a new DSLR zoom lens designed for travellers and backpackers, or anyone who wants an all-purpose zoom lens that’s both light and small.
The Sigma 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 DC Macro OS HSM is different because it’s been manufactured using a special polycarbonate material called Thermally Stable Composite (TSC).
A great way to breathe new life (often at little cost) into your photography is to adapt old lenses to use with your digital camera. There are two main options when it comes to choosing old lenses for your digital camera – using an old manual focus lens, or modern, low-tech glass from Lensbaby, Diana or other specialists. Both solutions mean you will sacrifice some of the automatic features on your digital camera, but that’s part of the appeal.
What is AF? We all know what autofocus is in principle, but how many of us really know how it works?
The autofocus system in your DSLR works by looking at the image, and then adjusting the lens using a motor. It can tell whether a shot is in focus by using the principle that a sharp image has a higher contrast than an out-of-focus one.
Camera lenses come in many different sizes. We take a look at the unfathomably massive – the world’s largest SLR lenses for non-military use.
Zoom lenses are undeniably great when it comes to convenience and versatility, delivering a wide range of focal lengths at the flick of a wrist. However, they demand a compromise in terms of outright image quality. With complex arrangements of large groups of lens elements moving back and forth to enable zoom, the optical purity suffers.
Sharpness is often the first casualty, and barrel and pin-cushion distortions often appear at the wide-angle and telephoto ends of the zoom range respectively.
What is a lens sweet spot? It’s something you’ve probably heard mentioned before, but all a lens’ sweet spot means is the aperture setting at which it is the sharpest.
It’s important to understand that your lens doesn’t retain the same level of sharpness throughout its aperture range, so by finding your lens’ sweet spot you will put yourself in a better position for getting sharper images. Inside, we show you how to do it in 3 easy steps
Does your lens has more letters after its name than a retired rocket scientist. What do all these lens markings mean? You can refer to a lens simply by the name of the manufacturer, the focal length, and its maximum aperture – a Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6, say, or Canon 50mm f/1.4. But as lenses have often evolved from decades of development, they usually have a line of additional letters after their names, stamped on the barrel or printed on the boxes.
Some lens markings are about manufacturer branding – defining a more recent range, or a lens that’s built to higher standards than another. Others are to do with the optics themselves, and to highlight specific technologies used in the lens construction. In the jargon-busting guide below, we’ll translate these lens markings for you.
To get close-up images of tiny subjects when shooting macro photography, you’d normally reach for a macro lens. But what if you want to shoot subjects so small that even the life-size reproduction provided by a macro lens isn’t enough? Why not try this handy reverse lens technique?
With a simple reversing ring that costs about £10 ($15), you can attach a lens to your camera the wrong way round. However, there are compromises when using a reverse lens method.
Are you thinking about buying a new lens for your DSLR or compact system camera?
Remember, the best lens isn’t always the most expensive. The best lens for your camera is the one with the features that best match your needs as a photographer.
These 9 essential tips should help give a solid foundation of what you might be looking for when you go to choose the best lens for your camera.
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