Hey Everyone! Hows your week going? Mine Great! Thanks for asking. Today I want to talk about your first prime lens. There are so many which one to get? Why a prime? What is a prime? All good questions and we will answer them. When your new into photography you get a entry level camera which is awesome and the company, no matter what brand you get, will put an inexpensive lens on so you can shoot right away. Its usually a zoom lens that give you many focal lengths to play with. These Zoom lenses are called Kit lenses and can be great lenses but more than not they are cheaply built and have smaller aperture ranges. But for someone just starting they are great! So after you've shot with them a while you start thinking about your next lens purchase. Really this will be your first lens purchase. You do some research and see what all the popular pros are shooting and those lenses are expensive and seem to be made out of un-obtainium. I think your first lens purchase should be a prime lens. It only has one focal length. Instead of being a 16-55mm its AMT2016-sony-a6300-review-0423-2Photographer: Anthony Thurston a 35mm or a 50mm. Instead of having a variable maximum f-stop rating of f3.5-5.6 it may have a rating of f1.8 or f2.8. These lenses are cheaper have wider apertures and are sharper than the kit lenses. So there is the why to get a prime and the what is a prime. But which one? Well let me tell you about my story. When I started in photography long, long time ago zooms were made out of un-obtainium and weren't that good or sharp. So when you bought a camera it usually came with a 50mm prime lens usually at f1.8 or 2.8. That is what you learned on and your feet were you're zoom. Now how does that help you? It doesn't I just wanted to talk about the old days. LOL Lets talk about some of the different focal lengths.

24mm is a very popular focal length now a days for VLOGing and for video most phones shoot at the widest in the 20's and the photo's that are on instagram and face book shot with phones are starting to be the normal for some folks. I think of 24 being a specialty wide angle lens and would not get this lens for my first prime. Unless your a VLOGer.

35mm is another popular lens.  It's not as wide as the 24 but wide enough for environmental portraits and Art Museum street photography to capture the whole scene. This lens is very popular with street photographers being able to get into tight corners of the city and still be wide enough to get the shot. This is a good choice for a first prime lens if you shoot in the city a lot or love to shoot environmental portraits.

50mm is the bread and butter lens. It is said to be the closest to how we see the world threw our own eyes. This is a good street although not as wide as the 35 but also great for portraits with the least amount of  Max Stansell Photography distortion.  Good for head shots and full length as well. They are sometimes called the nifty 50.  They can be had for just a couple of hundred or even cheaper used. This is a great value lens and I think every photographer should have one in their lens lineup. But the first one?

85mm is a portrait beast for head shots. Maybe a little too tight for everyday David street but I would have one on me if I shot a lot of street for the longer shots that can compress a little. One of my favorite lenses to shoot portraits with. I just love how one can really blur out the background. If you take a lot of Portraits its a must have in your lens lineup. But the first one?

135mm this is another great portrait lens and the first focal length that I bought as a teenager. This lens is long enough that you can do some telephoto work with it and shoot scenes that compress (bring the background in closer) .  I actually still have that lens that is so old that it is a screw mount lens as it screws into the body of the camera instead of a bayonet type that all modern camera's have now. 

Sarah So which one to use? Well it depends on what type of photographer you are. If you notice in all of the descriptions above I never mentioned Landscape. I don't think that a prime lens would be my choice for landscape although you could certainly use  one It would not be my choice. The easy and simple way to check is if your using Lightroom look and see which focal length you use more often by sorting your photos by focal length. The one with the most photo's wins. That would be the focal length that I would get. But take into consideration on what your going to use the lens for .  If you take portraits then the 50 or the 85 would be great choices. If you like environmental shots then the 35 would be great. If your a VLOGer then the 24 would be great. I really don't think the 135 should be the first. I think its too specialized in what it can do and the others are more versatile. My opinion.  So there you have it which prime to get first. So until next week . Get out and Shoot!

Hey Everybody! Hope you're having a great week.  This week is a continuation on Macro Photography.  I've got a pot of Chili cooking and its raining outside so what a better time to talk about Macro Photography.  The small world of macro photography can be found anywhere you are. You don't have to go to a special place you can use your back yard or inside on a rainy day to take Macro shots from another world. Making the ordinary look extraordinary !  What I'm about to give you is my way of doing Macro Photography I'm sure there are many ways and you can focus stack images to make the whole photo look sharp I'm not going to get into that much detail.  First off let's pick the subject.

Picking a subject. Well this is subjective! LOL Well it is .  You can choose anything you like because when its photographed so close up its hard to recognize as the object that you started with and becomes something more abstract. For my exercise today I'm going to use a coin. And like any photograph make sure the background is good. For this first exercise I'm going to use a 28-60 kit lens and an a 10mm extension tube. I'm using a on camera flash shooting through a small diffuser which is really making my background turn black. You don't need a flash you could use LED lights or bright sunlight from a window or your back yard.  I'm shooting all manual. I can use the auto focus to get me close to sharpness then I switch to manual focus for fine tuning. When I'm in Manual focus I use the focus peaking found on most modern camera's to tell me what is in focus and what is not. Remember when shooting in macro really close up you have a very small depth of field. To get the whole object (the coin) I would either have to shoot from above so the whole coin is in the same focal plane in focus or if I shoot from the side I would have to take multiple photo's with focus in different spots and blend in photoshop to get all in focus. That process is another discussion. I kind of like the blurry parts of a photo sometimes. As you can see with the first photo the middle is in focus but the bottom and top of the coin are out of focus and its more a close up shot than a macro. After I took the photo with the 10mm I took it with a 16mm and it looks closer but still not macro for me . But it does a good job. Now I could have combined the two extension tubes and got a 26mm which would have gotten me closer. But I decided not to and decided to go to a dedicated Macro lens. You can see that the 16mm on the right is a closer shot and that only the bottom of the coin is in focus. The next shots I took was with a 50mm dedicated macro lens that I bought second hand from MPB. I used all the same settings But I had to switch to a more sturdy tripod because this lens is much heaver than the kit lens that I was using. This photo on the left shows that with my first attempt I didn't get as close as I could have but did get much closer than the kit lens and the larger extension tube. I focused in manual using the peak focusing option in my camera or you can use the digital zoom in feature that most of modern camera's have. This lets you zoom in and fine tune your focus before you take the shot. As you can see the zoom in feature on the right photo of the photo on the left I could zoom in and really see the detail of the year date on the coin. The other method that I like to use is to get the subject the way you want it and with peak focusing option on my camera I can slowly go closer or further away and watch my focus come in. With peak focusing a color is used to highlight what is in focus on this photo on the left you can see how the focus is along the bottom of the coin and extends to the background as well. Hopefully you can see the highlights I took a photo of the back of my camera with my eye phone. But the bottom of the coin there is a small section that highlights the 1921 and extends to the background showing what is in focus. Those are really all of the techniques that I use. Nothing special. Macro photography can be fun and exciting but it also can be tedious work and small fractions of a inch matter. There is a whole world out there that no one else sees or notices .  So until next week get out and shoot!

Hey Everyone!  Hope you had a great week! This week I wanted to talk or share my thoughts on Macro Photography. Now I'm no expert and have recently acquired another Macro lens. I've had several over the years. But I've got one to add to my Landscape Photography Kit. So if I'm out and about and the light has gone bad I still can do some Macro Photography. Some really close up shots. So this blog will be mainly about gear. So lets start with the first question.

What is Macro Photography? Macro Photography is when the object size is the same size on the sensor or 1:1 Ratio or better.  So if your have a one centimeter object that your taking a photo of it will take up 1 centimeter on your sensor. What does all that mean? Not much to you and me except that you can focus real close. You can take photos of bugs and spiders and they take up the whole screen on your viewfinder without cropping the photograph to make it large.  When your shooting Macro you are shooting a whole new world that you can't usually see with your eyes or that you ignore altogether. Very Cool. 

What lens do I use to do Macro Photography. If you don't have a dedicated Macro Lens I would start with extension tubes.  Extension Tubes are put between your lens and a camera and let you focus closer.  They are inexpensive and don't have any glass in them so they won't effect the quality of your image. You can get a good set of three for under 50 bucks. You can use all three or stack them to get the effect you want. Macro Lenses come in a variety of focal lengths and price points. And as with everything in Photography you get what you pay for. But you can get some good gear on the cheap to start out.There are some third party lenses that are very inexpensive but they are manual focus only. Dedicated Macro lenses are versatile remember these lenses can be used for other stuff too. A 105mm Macro is an excellent focal length for portraits and is used by many in the portrait industry for head shots. The focal length as it pertains to Macro Photography will determine your working distance to your subject. The longer focal length you will have more distance between you and your subject the smaller the less working distance. Make sure you put into consideration on the type of camera your are using. A crop sensor will have to multiply the focal length by 1.5 to get the working focal length. A 50mm will act like a 75mm on a crop sensor camera. 100mm seems to be the sweet spot for premium Macro lenses but they come in all focal lengths. But remember to be a true macro it must magnify at a 1:1 ratio no mater what the lens says on the side of it. Some cheaper lenses say they are macro but aren't they may get close to the macro ratio but not quite. I have owned a 105mm macro when I shot Nikon and it was a excellent lens I sold that one and eventually got an older 60mm nikon lens that was also a good lens  but when I got rid of all of my Nikon gear that was the last lens that I held onto and used an adapter to fit it to my Sony cameras and used it quite a bit. I then sold it and was without for a while until I just purchased a used Sony 50mm f2.8 lens which I like very much. I have just started to play with it again that's why this blog was started.  These lenses can be expensive and I hear there are good third party lenses from companies like Tamron that make good ones. 

Accessories for Macro.  When shooting Macro photography the closer you get to a subject the more light you need. One of those Physics things. So to add light you can use artificial light like an LED light or a Flash. They make LED and Flashes that attach to the front of your lens and then go to your hot shoe of your camera. You can also just use a regular flash. Almost any will do you don't have to spend a lot of money on these because you will be using it in manual and not TTL. So you can use a basic flash that you can get for 60 bucks or so. A diffuser will also be handy to make that small flash look huge to the little object that you will be take a photo of. Now if you're going to be using your flash off camera you will need some sort of trigger  or cord to get the flash off camera. These can be inexpensive also.

Thats about all that you will need to shoot Macro and you probably have most of these things already in your photography arsenal. So get them out and dusted off and start using . My next blog on Macro will be about the how to do the macro shots not on gear. So until next week get out and start shooting.