One of my absolute favourite lenses for child photography is the Canon 85mm F1.8 Lens.  It's definitely my go-to lens for portraits, but what many people don't realise is that the 85mm is useful for so much more than portrait photography!  I love to use this lens for capturing candid shots outdoors with my child at the park or garden, for taking detail shots, and even for indoor documentary photographs.  In short, this lens can be a great all-rounder. 

There are several other reasons why I love this lens, so today I want to go over WHY this lens is so freakin' awesome, and why you might want to consider it for your own camera bag!  

If you are shooting Lifestyle or Documentary images - in other words capturing your everyday life - which lens is the best for you to use? Well, that is a pretty big question as there a number of options available to you, and each have their own plus and minus points, or things they are best suited for.  This is one reason why many people will have two or three prime lenses, or a couple of zooms, so that they have a range of lenses that they can pull out to give a different look. That, or they have a small lens addiction 😉

Let me start by saying this is a LONG post - not one of those "quick lists" of camera gear that doesn't really tell you very much nor is particularly helpful.  Today, I'm going to break this down for you - what you need, why you need it, what you can get away with using just now, what you should invest it first to get the biggest return on investment, along with a few tips and tricks for using them. 

Although I never want anyone to have to go out and buy new equipment,  I also want to keep it real. I don't want someone who keeps hearing that "it's not about the gear",  feeling discouraged because they are not getting images that are as good as they hoped when in fact, their gear DOES have some impact on their images.  That's not fair nor helpful in my book.

In the Live Snap Love Facebook Group, I notice that some of most common questions that come up is around camera gear, and lenses in particular.  I also know that for many of you just starting out with a new DSLR, and wondering what lens you need to get, it can be especially confusing! 

So, today, I'm going to break down why your kit lens is NOT the best lens for you when trying to learn photography and what you should look for instead.  Upgrading your lens from the kit one really will help you enormously when you starting out, as you will be more easily able to get sharper, cleaner images. 

Let's dive in! 

Buying yourself a new lens - particularly if this is your first purchase away from the kit lens - can be an overwhelming experience!  It's an important decision for you to make too, since your lens choice plays a critical role in making sure you images look the way you want them to! Unfortunately, there is no one single lens that will suit everybody, all of the time, so which lens is best definitely comes down to personal choice. 

With that in mind, I've come up with 8 questions that you can ask yourself before you buy a lens to determine which is the best lens choice for  YOU, and help you narrow down all the options that are out there. 

A couple of months ago, I finally caved and bought myself a new tripod.  My old one had been designed for a point and shoot camera, and as such, wasn't really designed to take the weight of the Canon Mk3 and a heavy lens!  Fearing the worst could happen to my kit if I continued to use it, I knew I needed a new tripod, but just wasn't keen on spending a lot of money on something that only gets used once or twice a month, and the roughest terrain that it is likely to be used on is the carpet in the playroom. 

When starting out in Photography, you can easily get overwhelmed about you need to purchase. As you are being constantly bombarded with information about all the different accessories available you might be wondering about which ones to get- and which ones to forget about! 

Although everyone will have different needs, I thought it might be useful to some of you to list a few of the little "extras" that I think are extremely useful to have with you on your photography journey. These will either simply make your life a little bit easier, and in most cases, improve your end result - which can only be a good thing right?

I'm in the process of buying myself a new tripod, and boy, it can be confusing to know what you are looking for!  So, I thought I'd write up a quick post on how to choose a tripod: what to look for, and how to narrow down the choices.  On thing I want to point is that I write all my posts with people like me in mind - lifestyle / portrait photographers who mainly shoot at home or in the local park, maybe dabble in macro or landscapes and so on, so if you intend going trekking in the Amazon for National Geographic, this post on tripods might not be the best one for you :) 

It doesn't matter where you are in your photography journey - just starting out or a seasoned old timer - lenses will always be important to you, since they are pretty essential tools in digital photography! So I figured it would be a good idea to put together a post that brings together all the posts I've written about lenses over the last year or so, so everything you need to know  is all in one place for easy reference.  

Whether you ready to buy your first lens or just looking to add to your lens collection, there should be something for you here!  

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)