closest ranges.. now with extension tube! Who needs macro lenses, anyway?

Hi everybody! I have news. I have a new extension tube.

Extension tubes are put in between the camera body and any existing lens. They effectively bring the range that you are able to focus on closer to you. For example:
















This is taken with the 30 mm lens about 1.5 feet from the They Might Be Giants - Apollo 18 cd case. This is the most zoomed-out picture this session, but the closest possible with the Sigma 30mm lens.














This is the disc cover taken with the 200mm lens from about 1.5 meters away, the closest possible. That's pretty darn far away for being this zoomed in.















This is a picture with the extension tube on my 200mm telephoto lens, held about 70cm away. (70 cm is as close as it can get, even with the tube. It's better than the 1.5 m that was the previous limit, that's for sure!)














This is my 30mm Sigma lens with the extension tube, focused to infinity. That's right, when you can already take pictures about a foot and a half away and you add 25mm between the lens and detector, you can only, just barely focus on something about 1cm away from the lens if you focus to where the lens itself would consider infinity without the tube. But you can still focus pretty dern close!

... if anybody has this RSS'd, welcome back!

Hi everybody. Sorry I was AWOL for a while there.

But I have news!!!! I have a NEW LENS!!!! a telephoto! a NICE telephoto!

like my Sigma lens, this one is Prime (no adjustable zoom), 200mm f/2.8L. With the factor built into my camera that's like 320mm. Which is pretty good.

The f/2.8L part is what sold me on this particular lens (well, that and the fact that it was on a pretty significant sale). These numbers mean that the aperture is about twice as big as can be expected with this degree of telephoto (that's less than thousands of dollars, anyway) - all the other telephoto lenses I was looking at had apertures higher than 4, most at 5.6). The L part means it's canon's top-of-the-line.

SO: with this lens, my camera can take pictures of areas about as big as the top section of my thumb appears when my arm is stretched all the way out - better than with ANY other lens! Awesome, huh? Yeah it was a nice sale, but I'm still not telling how much it cost.

Here's an example of some sandhill cranes that would've looked like specks with my other lenses.



and


See the moon there? that gives a good idea of what 320mm means in terms of telephoto.

See that the moon is also out of focus? I was confused about this, because the cranes were really far away, so I thought that every picture taken that was focused for more than 300 meters away was easily focused for infinity as well. I was wrong.

After noticing this, I started reading up on lenses and focal planes and something called the "hyperfocal distance." Now I know so much more about why this happens. (and if you follow the link, so will you. But I explain it all below as well, so you don't need to.)

Basically it's because I was using such a big aperture... I was using the maximum aperture of 2.8 because I knew that with such a smaller area being photographed there is much less total light coming through the camera, so increasing the aperture would decrease the risk of me blurring the shot by holding the camera unsteady. That is true.

BUT WHAT I DIDN'T KNOW was that when the aperture goes up, the space in front and behind the focal plane (the distances away from you that are in focus, or "field") narrows considerably (for example, think about this picture taken with my sigma lens (very large aperture, smaller focal length):



Now, see how the nearest crust of the pizza is out of focus? Then a little bit farther out, the pizza is in focus. this is the start of my "field" in this picture. On this particular picture, just before the cut on the pizza is where the focal plane is, that is, where it is MOST in focus. Then it goes for another inch or so, and the field ends, and it is blurry from there on out. This lens had a aperture of 1.4 when I took this, and so the field was about 2 inches wide when focused that close (it would have been wider if everything was farther away). Had I made the aperture something smaller, say F/8 or something, the whole pizza would have been in focus, (but I would have had to use a tripod because of the limited light coming through, and I didn't have a tripod, so the whole thing would've been blurry. But that's beside the point.)

Now these "hyperfocal distances" are the nearest point to you that you can focus on AND have your horizon also in focus. You can look these up in a table for different lenses and apertures, but basically the higher the focal length and the bigger the aperture, the farther the hyperfocal distance. For my ultra-wide, the farthest hyper-focal distance is about 6 feet, which is why EVERYTHING - near and far - in all of those pictures always looks sharp. If I stop down the aperture (that's what it's called when you shrink the aperture size) I can get the hyperfocal distance as close as 1.5 feet. (I have yet to do that, but now want to try.) Here's an example of something like that with my ultra-wide. Note the depth of field, and the horizon:




SO, back to the telephoto - if I'm not focusing at or past my hyperfocal distance, anything at infinity (like the moon or the horizon) will be out of focus, just like it is for any other camera.
What is the hyperfocal distance for a 200mm lens at F/2.8 (the moon-picture setting), you may ask? 2343 feet. That's Really Far. It's definitely farther than those cranes were flying, which was my focal plane, so that's why infinity was blurry.

Here's a picture focused past the 2343ft mark (and cropped in just a bit):





Boring post? not to me!

Look, I'm learning!

Here's another nice picture taken with the telephoto (just because that's probably more of what you're interested in besides the theory):



and



but that last one got you thinking about depth of field again, right?

Introducing Ultra-Wide!

The Prima Donna of my lenses (all 2 of them)!

Again, that focal length issue. It's called 10-22mm (so this one does zoom) but due to the sensor size the effective length is 16-35mm. 16mm is TWICE as wide as a normal camera lens gives you (zoomed in is nearly same as a normal camera).


See?! this picture would've been impossible with any common lens.





Both these pictures were taken inside the National Cathedral, which is fairly dark even during daytime. So I used a tripod on the first one, and took a gamble with using the tripod folded up as a monopod with the second one and it turned out. But that's something I need to watch out for with this lens.. it needs a lot more light than the sigma lens. A LOT more light.



Luckily the OUTSIDE was brilliant all weekend. This picture was originally to just tease Vishaka because she kept having to back up from the monument to get it all in her viewfinder. I could practically walk right up to it and get it all in. So I took a couple steps right behind her and took a picture of the BOTH of them. (then it turned out to be a cute picture so I put it online.)

Seriously, with this lens zoomed all the way out I can get in almost 90 degrees of vision. That is, if a point directly in front of me is on the bottom edge of the field - say if I'm standing 10 feet away from the washington monument, it would be a point near the base at my height - the top of the monument would be well within the picture.

But that would make an awkward, kind of crappy sort of picture so I didn't take it. But still! I could've!

This lens was most of the reason I bought the new camera in the first place. Can you see why?

Let's meet my lenses... Starting with the Sigma lens

Meet Sigma Lens!

As you see in the list on the left the sigma lens has a focal length of 30mm, but because the detector in the camera body is smaller than the 35mm film the lens is built to expect, it has an effective focal length of 48mm (like a zoom of 1.6x of a normal, zoomed all-the-way-out film or digital camera). The Sigma lens is also a fixed lens (no zoom), which supposedly means it is way higher quality - and supposedly beginner photographers use zoom inappropriately where they should probably walk toward or away from subjects for the better picture.

So I have a lot to learn!

Not every post will be this boring, I promise. I'm just getting the technicalities out of the way because after all, it is all stuff I just learned and this IS my "camera's blog."

Sample pictures ahoy!:



See here there wasn't anything to take a picture of when I unpacked, except for other things that I unpacked...


This picture is significant because it was really dark in this room and my aperture was wide open, and this lens has a big aperture, so the picture turned out crisp.


Now I was just showing off.

My Camera's Very Own Website

This is my camera's own website. Or Blog. Or Journal.

Let's call it a Blog because it's on Blogger.

This is where I'll post pictures I took and try to explain what may be significant about them in terms of what I was going for, or what ended up happening.

Got it? Got it.

The link is to the left - yes there's only one - and it's to my Picasa gallery that will have all the pictures I refer to within this blog.. and more. There are also lots of old pictures on it, taken for the most part with little automatic digital cameras. I unpacked my new camera on the night of August 31, 2007, so anything taken before that is with one of these little guys, and afterward with Alphonso himself.

Yeah, his name is Alphonso, and fully anthropomorphized.

MOST IMPORTANT! Give advice! Comment! Question! ... Etc!

I'm learning as I go with this thing - so don't worry about offending me or anything, I'll take all the constructive criticism as I can get!