One of the main benefits of owning a DSLR is the ability to change lenses to suit what and where you are photographing.   

As you progress beyond the kit lens, and start to look at adding to your lens collection. one age old question pondered by many always crops up. Should I buy a zoom lens or prime lens?  

It's a very difficult question to answer because there are a lot of factors to take into consideration: your preferred shooting style, your available budget, and what your main subjects are going to be. 

Hopefully what I can do here today is give you some things to think about when you are comparing the two!

Ready? Let battle commence 😀

You may have heard the term "fast lenses" or "flat glass" o your photography travels, and wondered what the hell that meant, and whether that meant you had to go and get one of them too. 

In this post, I'm going to break down what fast glass actually is, and why having one in your lens arenas is a good idea!

Anyone else noticing how dark it's getting? Winter is on it's way!  As much as I love the dark evenings for a new host of shooting opportunities, one of the things I picked up last year that I had been hankering after for ages was a Canon Speedlite to help with my indoor pictures over the dark winter months. 

I thought it might be helpful for some of you to understand why you might need or want to use an external flash on some occasions, especially now that the day light hours are getting shorter! 

I've covered a fair bit on lenses this past week, comparing different focal lengths and understanding lens compression, and I thought I'd rewind a bit for any new photographers, and talk about what the numbers on the lens mean. 

This was one of my very first questions I had when buying my DSLR and it took me a little while to figure out! Hopefully this post will help break this down if you are new to lenses too. 

So, let's take a look at some lenses and break down the numbers to see what they mean, and what you should look for. 

Let's start with a lens that you will often see sold as a "kit lens" with your camera:  

When we choose a lens to take an image with,  most of the time we are looking at how much we want to fit into the frame, and far away from our subject we are. For example, if you are shooting indoors in a small room, but you want to leave in some of the surroundings to give the image context, then you are going to want to choose a shorter focal length.  If you are photographing something farther away,  like your child at sports day, you are going to want to have a longer length lens on your camera, so you can be farther back but still have the whole of your child in the frame.  In the post I did yesterday, you can see just how much more you can fit into the frame with a 35mm than a 200mm. (Check out the post on focal length comparisons if you missed it!) 

As I mentioned in that post, there is another reason for using certain lenses over and above how near or far we are from our subjects, and that is the lens compression.

I finally got around to photographing focal length comparisons again this week - I know these can be really helpful as a reference point. 

I gave up on trying to get someone to model for me - since one certain little boy wouldn't stay in the same place for long enough whilst I went through all my lenses (twice!) we have the lovely Dave as our model instead.  I'm pretty fond of Dave, he's very obliging :) 

So, each of these photos has been taken with a different lens, and therefore a different focal length,  so you can see how your field of view changes with each one. For this first set I'm sitting in the same location for each shot, just changing my lens to get the different focal lengths. (If you are wondering which lens were used you can check out the lenses here) 

After investing all that money on your amazing new camera and lenses, it makes sense to spend a little time on DSLR maintenance to make sure that they stay in tip top condition. This is mainly so that you continue to get the best image quality and extend the life of your equipment, but it also helps should you want to sell on some of your equipment at any time. I've sold a couple of lenses now and I've gotten a pretty good price for them: lenses in particular hold their value well if you look after them.   I have a bit of a routine that I have with cleaning and maintaining - this is what I do....

It started innocently enough - a quick visit to Amazon to purchase a disposable waterproof camera to get some underwater shots. Four hour later, I had somehow managed to develop an underwater camera obsession, and could even be seen eyeing up Ikelite Housing for my DSLR at a whopping $1,700.   I have looked at everything from disposables to "rugged" cameras to underwater housings, so I thought I'd put all that recently gained knowledge to good use and list some of the options that are available to you if you fancy taking some underwater pictures yourself.....

If you want to actually BE IN some of the pictures you are taking, then you will find life much easier if you have either a wireless remote or interval timer! Both of these work by allowing you to press the shutter remotely, so you can actually be in front of the camera but still in control.  They both work a little bit differently, a wireless remote is a small transceiver that you simply point at the camera. They are small and inexpensive, and allow you to take a picture as and when you would have pressed the shutter if you were behind the camera. 

Last week I mentioned how much I enjoy Macro - it's like therapy via photography for me - but it can get quite expensive if you want to get really serious about it.  However, if like me, you just want to be a casual macro shooter, all you really need is a dedicated macro lens.. A true macro lens are those that have a 1:1 ratio, which basically means they can capture your subject at life size magnification (some other macro lenses offer 2:1 magnification or some less than 1:! but for the sake of this article I've stuck with those that are "true" macro) When shopping for a macro lens, there are two main areas with are usually fraught with confusion, or at least they were for me, the focal length and whether to get IS / VR or not

As you know, I don't have a studio or any kind of studio lighting - but I do have a garage, a cheap background stand, one roll of background paper, and that - coupled with some natural light - is all you need for a makeshift studio on a budget! 

The Canon 50mm F1.8 s a little gem of a lens for it's price, and because of that it's one that I recommend to all beginners over the kit lens. However, there is another 50mm made by Canon which is not too mind-crushingly expensive - the Canon 50mm F1.4. I know many people with the F1.8 will have considered upgrading to the F1.4 (or wondering whether just to buy that one straight off and bypass the F1.8 version), and wondered whether it was worth the price. Well, I upgraded a couple of years ago, but before I sent my old lens off to it's new home, I did some comparison shots to see how much difference there was between the two.

Fancy treating yourself to a new photography book to curl up with this weekend but don't know what to get? Don't worry, help is here! I know it can be hard to know which to buy from the multitude available out there, so - seeing as I appear to have my own mini library of them -  I've compiled a list of books that should give you some idea of what to add to your Amazon cart this weekend!  I should point out, I don't have all of these: some are books that I have read and enjoyed, others are ones that have been recommended to me by people I trust, and I've thrown in a couple that have caught my eye but that haven't actually got around to buying yet!

One of the best things I did in my photography journey was to start setting my white balance in camera, rather than relying on AUTO.  I was really struggling with getting the right colour in my image - in particular skin tones - and I could spend ages mucking around in Lightroom or Photoshop trying to get the image to look "right". When you can't "see' colour correctly, this is a really, really hard task! 

Today I'm going to share some tips for using the Canon 50mm F1.8 lens. I know that many of you will have this lens, because it's probably the one that most people go for when upgrading from their kit lens. When I first got this lens a few years ago, I would hear about the quality of it for the price and how tack-sharp my images were going to be, but they weren't, in fact every single one looked downright soft! So the lens got shoved back into my camera bag and forgotten about. But not one to give up on $125 easily, I decided to take the time to figure it out - and I'm so glad I did!  So, here's my tips for how to use the 50mm 1.8 and get the sharp images it is capable of!