Ok, I'm just about done with my recent bee shoot stuff, but there's one post I wanted to make on the whole thing.

The last post was about the process of setting up the hive, but I specifically avoided talking about the photography side of things.  I'm going to go into that now.  This ain't about bees, it's about what I learned taking the pictures of them.

• First...  as with anything that you plan to take decent shots of, know what you're shooting!  In this case, I didn't really have a clue.  I was expecting maybe a few bees to be flying around and as long as I didn't move around too much, I'd be fine.  Oops!  I did NOT expect them to be EVERYWHERE and I didn't expect them to be as active as they were.  Honestly, if I had known, I would have probably used only the 75-300mm lens and the tripod from quite far away.  The whole up close thing was really pretty freaky and is not something I'd want to repeat without some protective gear.
• Second...  know your lenses.  I actually learned a lot about my two lenses after processing all the pictures.  I only had a vague idea of how the lenses behaved before this.  I'll go into detail about the differences I noticed between the two lenses a bit later in this post.  Had I realized how much of a difference there was between them both, I would have made some totally different choices about what shots I was taking with each lens.  Suffice to say for now, the Tamron 75-300 would have gotten a LOT more use on this shoot if I'd done some real comparisons beforehand.
• Third...  Expect the worse to happen.  There were two things I could imagine going horribly wrong with this process.  This first is a trip to the emergency room when someone got 200 bee stings.  The second was a dead or broken camera.  Luckily neither happened, but going into it expecting to get stung made it a lot more bearable when I did get my one sting of the day.  I'll go into that in more detail some other time.  The camera did it's job and didn't give me any hassles.  That's a good thing, because I can't even afford lenses, let alone a backup camera.  Had it failed, I simply wouldn't have been able to take any more pictures.
• Fourth...  Bring lots of memory.  I started with an empty 2Gb card, which I filled up about halfway through.  I then had to dig for my 4Gb card and use that for the rest of the shots.  I should have started with the 4Gb.  I had really considered ONLY taking the 2Gb card in the morning, but did snag several others as I ran out the door... "just in case".
• Fifth (and finally)...  Know your gear and keep it handy.  I had NO chance to use the tripod for half the shots, mainly because I'd chosen a bad spot to set it up and partly because I abandoned it when the bees started bouncing off my head.  I'm really glad Rob rescued it for me, as it's really hard to get crisp shots on that 75-300mm lens without the tripod.  Also, I'd set my camera to 100 ISO.  This is mainly because I always try to shoot 100 ISO unless I'm doing night shots...  That whole "fear of noise" thing.  I should have bumped it up to 400 right off the bat.  The sky was overcast, we were under trees and the lighting generally sucked.  Bumping up to 400 ISO would have gotten me much clearer pictures and I'd have more of them.  I ended up tossing about 150 shots because the shutter speed wasn't high enough to stop the camera shake.  I'll be taking a lot more shots at 400 ISO so I can figure out it's limitations and get used to change in shutter speeds and aperture.

Ok, let me talk a little about the lenses here.  I started shooting relatively close to the hive with my kit lens, a Canon EF-S 18-35mm f3.5-5.6.  It's a cheap lens, but it's fairly flexible.  Compared to my other lens, this one lets in a lot more light, so I can get a higher shutter speed.  It's also much faster to focus than the other.  The depth of field is also easily managed...  I can blur out the background when I want to, but still have a fairly decent range that's in focus.  The problem with it is that it's REALLY soft.  This isn't apparent until you compare it to the Tamron.  The Tamron is an AF70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD.  Here's an example...

The picture on the left is done with the Canon 18-35, the one on the right is done with the Tamron 75-300. You're probably going to have to click on them and show all sizes in Flickr to really see what I'm going to talk about.  I'd recommend the large size to see what I'm talking about.  For this discussion, just ignore the brightness... that was my choice of camera settings and post-processing and has very little to do with the lenses.

The Canon shot (on the left) has a wide (or long) depth of field... shorter lenses generally do.  You can see that almost everything from the front of the hive box all the way to Rob's gloves and jeans are pretty much in focus.  You can see a bit of a blur in front of the box opening, which is a bee that's between me and the hive box.  You can also see the ground behind the hive box is somewhat out of focus.  You can tell there are leaves and twigs and a driveway behind that, although it's not at all sharp or crisp.  At full size, you can see there are a few spots on the driveway and can probably make an educated guess that they are leaves.

Now let's take a look at the Tamron shot (on the right - again, I recommend you open it separately and view the large size).  Notice how the corner of the hive box is in focus.  Some of the bees on the shipping box are in focus, but as you get near the entrance, they start going blurry pretty quickly.  You can see there's a bush or something behind the hive box, but after that it's just a green blur.  This is a narrow depth of field, which is normal on long lenses.  It's not a problem (and I quite like it most of the time), but you have to keep in mind that this will happen in order to plan your shots. 

I knew about and was prepared for all the DOF stuff I just talked about.  What I didn't know and wasn't prepared for was the lack of clarity on the Canon lens.  If you look at both images at large or original sizes, you should be able to see that the parts of the Tamron shot that are in focus are really crisp compared to the Canon shot.  I'm finding this more and more as I shoot with the Canon lens.  It's really starting to bug me.  The odd thing is that I think the Canon should be sharper than the Tamron.  Shorter lenses generally take much clearer pictures, simply due them having less to cause any kind of "pollution" to the light coming into the camera.  Both lenses are "cheap" - pretty much bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, but I really expected the Canon to blow the Tamron out of the water when we're talking about image quality.  Not so at all.

That kind of sucks for a couple of reasons.  The first is that the Tamron does not do well in low light scenarios, which is what I prefer to shoot.  It can only go down to an f4, and it really needs a tripod to get rid of camera shake.  The second reason is that the Tamron is just really hard to shoot with.  It's such a long lens on my camera that it's nearly useless unless you really WANT to zoom in. My camera is a 1.6x crop factor sensor, which means that the functional focal length is basically equivalent to the lens focal length multiplied by 1.6. So, that 75-300mm lens becomes a 120-480mm lens.  We're getting into long-distance wildlife shooting ranges there!  Great if you're on safari somewhere, but lousy for walking around town with.  "Hey, that's a neat statue I want to take a picture of... let me walk 2 blocks away from it so I can fit it all in the frame."

So, what's the solution?  Probably just save my pennies and get a 50mm f1.4 lens.  That's pretty much a compromise between the two lenses I have.  Since it's a prime lens (no zooming), it should automatically be clearer than both of my existing lenses, just because it has much less glass.  Also, prime lenses generally have better glass in them to start with, which increases the image quality even more.  The 50mm on my camera will effectively act like an 80mm lens, which I think is a good "walking around, shoot everything" length.  Plus, being able to go all the way to f1.4 means I'll be able to take some crazy night shots. ;)

In the mean time I'm going to take a lot more test shots with both lenses.  I plan on checking each lens at different apertures in order to see if they have a "sweet spot".  It's possible the Canon can get a lot sharper, but maybe only at f4 or so instead of wide open at f3.5.  That will give me a much longer depth of field (not always a good thing), but it'll be nice to know if I can use the sharpness when the DOF doesn't matter.

Summary

I learned something about how my lenses behave and I figured out what I want to do to explore them some more.  That's kind of what it's all about. ;)

Posted by smthng | 0 Comments [Edit]

Filed under: Photography, Tamron, Canon, Depth of Field, Lenses, Thoughts, Bees [Edit Tags]

Friday, April 20, 2007 9:12 AM

Executive Shadows

Time to try getting back to my semi-regular pictures.  Here's one from this morning...

I know it's crooked AND it has some barrel distortion, but I still kind of like the shadows and harsh highlights.  I'll post up another one from the same spot someday when I get some good light and maybe do a side-by-side comparison.

Thursday, April 19, 2007 10:09 AM