Tag Archives: lens

Pano Experiment with a Fisheye

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I will freely admit this is not my idea. It is something that I read about recently on an astrophotography post that caught my attention. I was about to make a visit to a museum where I thought I might end up taking some interior images in confined space. My 16-35mm lens was probably going to do the trick but I wondered whether the fisheye might be a better bet if things were really tight. My only concern with that is the distortion is such a feature of that lens that it might not be worthwhile.

Then I came across the aforementioned article and it talked about shooting panos with a fisheye. The article was concerned with wide sky shots for astrophotography, but I thought it might work for me too. Supposedly, stitching together multiple fisheye shots takes out a lot of the distortion while still giving you the wide reach. I decided to experiment with this in advance to see if it worked.

I played with this indoors but taking a sequence of shots with good overlap between them making sure to catch as wide an image as possible. I was using the fisheye with full frame coverage rather than the circular version of the image. In Lightroom, I had to turn off the profile correction since that plays with the shots a lot and then set the pano function to work. It combined the images very easily and, sure enough, the verticals across the shot were not all vertical and not distorted at all. This could be something I now use a lot in the future when working in confined spaces. I will need to test it for closer subjects first since I suspect that will be a lot more testing for the alignment issues in pano stitching.

Heavy Departures from SEA

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I have had plenty of chances to shoot the departures from SEA when they are on a northerly flow and the afternoon light provides a good option for the jets.  Previously, I have used the 500mm since it gives good reach but, for the larger jets, as you get the jet abeam your position, it will be too large for 500mm.  The arrival of my 200-800 provided a great new option.  800mm provided a tighter view on the jets after rotation (provided the heat haze is not negating any focal length benefit) and the ability to zoom out means that you can keep the aircraft fully framed throughout the climb out.  I took the lens down when I first had an open afternoon and the right conditions and here are some of the results.  As fall moves towards winter and the heat haze and high sun become less of an issue, this combo should get even better.

The Hummers Are a Quick Test for the New Lens

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One of the things that I knew would be a limitation of the RF 200-800 was the aperture which is a lot smaller than for really expensive lenses (yes, it is also expensive but not in the tens of thousands type of expensive).  In low light, this is going to be an issue and it would be interesting to see how things worked out.  When I got home with it, I was sitting on the deck when some hummingbirds started feeding on the flowers in one of our beds.  This area is in shade a lot of the time so light was limited.  I was rather pleased with the effectiveness of the focus, the sharpness at full zoom and the relatively limited noise related issues from the R3.  This is a combination that looks like it could be quite useful for a wide variety of occasions.  Not the solution for everything but definitely versatile.

Shooting Deliberately Tight on Arriving Airliners

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The arrival of the Starlux A350 has already appeared in a previous post.  I got there a little ahead of its scheduled approach and, since I was playing around with using my longer lens, I decided to try shooting some of the preceding arrivals with the same lens from head on to get some tighter compositions and see just what would work before the planes got chopped off by the limited field of view.  I had a variety of types coming in from the little E175s to 777Fs.  They gave me some things to work with and I quite like how some of them came out.  A bit of variety is good when the subjects are very repetitive.

Initial Impressions of the RF 200-800

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When Canon announced the RF 200-800 lens, I was mildly interested but not too bothered by it.  However, in an example of how easily a weak mind can be influenced, when I watched some reviews by those that had used the lens, I started to be more curious.  The focal length range was always of interest, but the aperture range had initially put me off.  The reviewers suggested that the excellent ISO performance of modern mirrorless cameras meant this wasn’t an issue.  Also, while not in anyway cheap, the lens was very well priced for the range it offered.

I went to my local shop and placed a deposit for one of the lenses.  This was many months ago.  After that, things got very quiet.  I was beginning to think that I would never see an actual lens.  Then I saw something on a Canon rumor site that said August was likely to be a time when a lot of lenses got delivered.  Whatever the blockage had been, there seemed to be some relief.  The last Tuesday of July (stuff seems to get delivered to stores on Tuesday I guess), I get a phone call telling me that my lens has arrived.  Hurrah!

After work, I headed down to pick it up.  I then headed down to the water in Kenmore – a short distance from the store – to give it a quick go.  I didn’t have a lot of time, but I got a quick feel for some of its quirks.  Initially I was a little unsettled.  The stabilization seemed very effective, but it did make tracking things that were moving slowly a bit jerky as if the stabilization didn’t believe that I actually wanted to be moving.  I worried that this would be an issue.  However, the images seemed to be rather sharp so maybe it knew what it was doing.

When I got home, I did spend a little time looking at the hummingbirds on the bushes.  The light was very low, which should be a problem for a lens with smaller apertures, but it seemed to work very well and the images were surprisingly sharp and clean.  I then took it to its first airshow.  Again, results were really very pleasing.  The 800mm reach was so helpful since the show line was quite distant and I was veery happy with the framing I could get.  The jumpiness in the viewfinder is still something I find rather distracting but it doesn’t seem to be an issue for the images, so I guess the stabilization knows what it is doing.  I also shot some video at 800mm handheld and, while there was initial wobbling, there comes a moment when it seems to get what is going on and then it is rock steady.  Quite bizarre.  I think this lens could be a key part of my shooting going forward.  We shall see as my experience grows with it.

What is Wrong with My Phone’s Longest Lens?

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The quality of modern phone cameras is really impressive.  I will often have the main camera with a longer lens and use the phone for the wider shots.  Other times, it will be the only camera I have.  Quite often I will shoot multiple images with the longest of the three lenses and then stitch them together when I get home.  This can be quite effective.  However, in playing with some images recently, I was getting very odd results from the shots.  I shoot RAW on the phone, but I understand it isn’t a true RAW file but one that Apple’s software pre-processes to some extent.  This seems to be resulting in some strange image qualities.

The shots will have the resolution that they are supposed to, and the file size is certainly large enough to suggest that is what is happening.  However, the shots look ridiculously smudgy.  Here are a couple of examples that show the problem.  The Allegiant jet I shot at Mesa Gateway is a particularly bad example.  It isn’t even the one shot. All three of them are rough.  I have had some shots with really great quality from this lens on the phone so I have no idea why this should be bad.  The odd thing is that, if I look into the file properties and compare with other shots with this lens, it shows a different focal length.  If anyone has any experience or background on this, please let me know.

Strange Little Isolated Tree

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Sometimes you just don’t have the right gear with you.  I had gone to Juanita Bay after work and was only carrying one camera with the 500mm on it.  Looking down in to the water to one side of me, I was quite taken by a stump in the water that had a new growth of a small tree coming from the top of it.  It was too far away to get a decent shot with the phone so the 500mm was the only option.  I took a sequence of shots to stitch together later on.  I quite like the separation that you get with using such a long lens for a shot like this.  I wonder how large the tree will ultimately grow to be given the limitations of its home!

Why Am I Struggling with the Butterflies?

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The flowers in our back yard are very popular with butterflies and, with nice evening light in the garden, I was bound to drag out the macro lens.  However, when I tried getting some shots, the camera was having a really hard time focusing.  I often ended up using the manual focus ring to get something close when the camera kept focusing on the background.  I had struggled with a couple of other subjects previously and I was beginning to get really annoyed.  This was not a cheap lens, and the camera certainly isn’t cheap but why wouldn’t it focus on a butterfly?  I was using animal mode so thought it would cope.

I ended up trying different focus area modes.  Narrowing it down to the small focus spot and moving that around by hand rather than using the subject detection modes was my next effort.  I seemed to have some better luck, but it still was unreliable and was giving me a red box around the focus area.  Why wouldn’t it work.  I took a look in the menus to see if there was something in there which was going to be an issue but nothing there either.  I was beginning to be fearful I had a dud.  Then I noticed something.  The focus limit switch had moved from the full range to having a minimum focus distance of 0.5m.  That would certainly be an issue.  Put it back to where it should have been and suddenly the focus was working perfectly.  What a dope.  Not sure when I had knocked that switch but it might have been a while back.  Doh!

Go With The Long Lens

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For quite a while I have been shooting almost exclusively with the 100-400mm lens while photographing aircraft.  Recently, I knew I had a couple of smaller aircraft inbound and I picked up the 500mm which hadn’t got a lot of use for a while.  While it is a fixed focal length and therefore inflexible for things getting too close, with something small, it works out fine.  When I checked out the images later, I noticed that I had a far higher keeper rate at low shutter speeds than I have got recently with the 100-400.

I decided to stick with it again on another day of shooting and had similar results.  I decided even to sacrifice the closer shots and work with the long lens to get framing I wanted further away and to then go for close ups of details when things got too large.  I was overall very happy with the results.  I think the weight of the 500mm is such that it is a lot harder to disturb it with small twitches.  The 100-400 is so much lighter, maybe it is more sensitive to my lack of smoothness.  The inertia of the big lens is a benefit.  I think I shall be using it more again going forward.  Besides, it is so sharp when you get it right!