 Carolina Beach Sunset
Hey Everyone! Last blog we discussed camera bodies and when and if you should upgrade. This blog we'll be talking lenses and the scoop on them. Kit lenses, primes, and zooms. So some of the big questions are: What lenses do I need? What is a kit lens? What is a prime lens? Zooms? These are all very big and difficult questions and can be overwhelming for a new photographer looking to upgrade lenses. The answer to these questions are all from me, not necessarily the industry standard but my opinion. And in my opinion, investing in good-quality lenses is way more important than what camera body you have. Lenses last a lot longer than camera bodies and can be used for decades. I still use on occasion vintage lenses from the 60’s and still get good quality results from them. So buying the best quality lens you can afford to me is more important than buying the latest and greatest gadget body you could buy.
What are kit lenses? Kit lenses are usually cheaper-made lenses that come with your camera, and you usually buy them as a kit, hence the name. They are usually not as sharp as more expensive lenses, but sharp enough for everyday. The focal range varies by manufacturer. The quality control on these lenses is not as precise as a more expensive lens might be, so you could get a copy that may not be too sharp. But you could also get lucky and get a good copy that is extremely sharp. I have a kit 55-210 lens that is very sharp and works well.
Primes vs Zooms: What are prime lenses? Prime lenses have just one focal length. A 50mm, 35mm, and 85mm. So if you want the subject to be closer, you walk closer. And if you want the subject farther away, you back up. Primes are great for a few reasons. They are usually cheaper, and you can get a larger aperture like f1.4 that can make great background blur for portraits or for separating the subject. They used to be considerably sharper than zooms, but zooms have caught up to them as far as I’m concerned. They are smaller and lighter if that is a concern for you. What are zoom lenses? Zooms have ranged focal distance like 16-35mm, 24-70mm, or 70-200mm. If you want the subject closer, you just turn a ring on the lens and, zoom, they get closer, hence the name. Zooms' advantage is that they are easy to compose a subject by zooming. You can cover a number of focal lengths with one lens. They are larger and heavier than primes if that is a consideration for you.
What lenses do I need? First you have to decide what kind of photographer or photography you’ll be doing because the choices a landscape photographer may make compaired to a portrait or a wildlife photographer would be different. What type of photo you are looking to get will
determine what type of lenses you will be wanting to purchase. Let’s break it down into categories.
Everyday shooter. If you're just getting into photography and you shoot primarily when you take vacations and events your family and kids have, I would suggest the kit lens that came with your camera kit. They usually have a large focal range from say 55-200ish. It varies by brand. But these lenses are versatile and can do a lot and are not specialized. A good carry-around lens.
Landscape: Landscape photographers like to shoot very wide or long. So a 16-35mm and say a 70-300mm lens would work great, the greater the maximum
 The MetroCommuters waiting for the Metro in Washington DC.
aperture you can afford. F4 is fine. 2.8 is good also, especially for the 16-35 that would give you the option of shooting astro photography with the 16-35 when you have the 2.8 model. For landscape photography, weight is also a thing to consider since you usually have to haul your gear maybe miles to the location you're going to shoot. So the smaller aperture f4, especially in the 70-300, would make that lens considerably lighter and just as sharp because you would rarely need to shoot at F4 or smaller with that lens.
Portraits: Portraits can be shot with a wide range of lenses, but usually 75mm and longer give the best results, especially for head and shoulder
shots. And the bigger the aperture the better, so f2.8, 1.8, or even as low a 1.2 is desired to give that creamy blurred background. Here is where primes really shine. Primes seem to be cheaper and tac sharp compared to zooms with large constant aperture. When portrait photographers find a lens that they really love, they will shoot it forever.
Wildlife/Sports: Wildlife photographers like it long, so 200mm plus up to 600mm. These are large, expensive lenses to buy, up to $10,000, but there are some cheaper versions that work great for $2,500 or less. They just have smaller apertures. Sports photography also falls in this category, but they use all ranges of lenses from wide to super telephoto.
Street: Street photographers like 50mm and smaller. Small concealed lenses on small bodies are great for street. As s street photographer, you want to blend in with the environment, and a large camera with a big lens is just the opposite. 35mm seems to be the sweet spot for street photographers.
 Wine glass Splash
So did I answer any questions? Probably not. You have heard or seen on YouTube about the holy trinity of lenses that every photographer should have. They are a wide zoom, medium zoom, and a telephoto zoom and usually cover a distance focal length of say 16-200 and usually at f2.8 aperture. Don’t get me wrong. These are great lenses no matter what manufacturer makes them, but they are heavy and expensive. And depending on what you shoot you may not need them. My advice is to start with a focal length range that you seem to shoot a lot. For me, a 24-70 range is where 90 percent of my photos are taken. Rent that lens and use it awhile to see if it fits you. If it does, great. Buy it and shoot it a lot while you're saving for the next one. By doing this you can invest in a good quality lens and take your time, save up some money, and get another good quality lens. To me, one good-quality lens is better than three low-quality lenses.
So you're probably wondering, "Well, Max, what do you have?" Well, I am a gear hound and have had a lot of GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) in the past, but I’m trying to make my gear smaller in quantity and larger in quality. So when I shoot landscape photography, I carry three lenses: a 10-18mm f4(16-25mm full frame equivalent) for wide angel stuff, a Ziess Sony 16-70mm f4 (24-105mm full frame equivalent), a Canon 70-200 f4L (105-300mm full-frame equivalent), and a Metabones adapter for the Canon lens to my Sony. For street photography I use primes, mostly a 23mm f2.8 Rokinon (35mm full frame equivalent), a Sony 35mm f1.8 (50mm full frame equivalent), and then a Sony 55-210mm f3.5-56 (70-300mm full-frame equivalent). I do have a specialty lens, a Rokinon 12mm f2.0, that I use for astro photography and extension tube that I use with my Sony 35mm for macro closeup work. I also have a cheap 50mm f1.8 lens that I use for portraits. I have some vintage lenses that I also use, but these are my main lenses that I use.
I hope this has helped you. Deciding on what to get can be confusing and a big investment. Take your time and get what’s right for you. Next time I think I will talk about finding the sweet spot of your lens, what aperture and focal length is the sharpest. Until then, keep shooting!
Hey everyone! The holidays are almost upon us and spending is rampant with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Everything is on sale and you're thinking to yourself, I sure could use that brand new so-and-so gadget. This is a blog that is going to be the beginning of a gear series. This blog will be focused on camera bodies, what you need and what you think you need. As photographers we are all afflicted with GAS (gear acquisition syndrome), some of us more than others. I have had severe cases of GAS in the past and have spent more money than I should have because I just needed the newest gadget or lens or camera body. But did I? In most cases, I could have saved thousands of dollars and just kept the camera I had. I should have invested in better lenses and not more lenses. So this blog is going to be about camera bodies and when to invest in newer equipment. There are some questions you need to ask yourself and be honest with yourself when doing so. I will go through my thought
process when I was last considering upgrading my camera body.
Question #1. Will upgrading to a newer body improve my photography? Although we all think it will, most of the time it won't. Just because it's newer doesn't mean that it will improve your photography. A lot of the time the newer camera is so advanced that we have a hard time just figuring out how to use it. We all have been there. The learning curve can be so frustrating that when we get the new camera we don't use it to its full ability and it is no better than the one that we upgraded from. Most of us don't use our current camera to the fullest. We know just enough to get by. But if we learned our current camera and all the features, we might find that we don't need a new camera at all. If you have a camera that was built in the last six or seven years, you have a good enough camera to do most of what you need. Now, if you're a professional and you earn money from your cameras, an upgrade might come earlier. But if you are a hobbyist like I am, most of your work is on the web and a few prints, and any camera that was built recently will be fine.
 AMT2016-sony-a6300-review-0423-2Photographer: Anthony Thurston
Question #2. Is the upgrade you're considering worth the money that you're going to fork out for it? This is a personal question. Some folks have lots of money at their disposal and can upgrade every year and more power to them. But if you're like me money matters. Recently, I had been waiting for the newest Sony upgrade in the Crop Señor line that I shoot with. The rumors were rampant on what this new camera would have. When it finally came out over a year later, I was under whelmed. Don't get me wrong. It's a great camera. But for the type of photography I do, I didn't need all of the upgrades that this camera made. I don't do video, so 4k anything doesn't mean that much to me. Super fast focusing although is great. I'm a landscape and travel type of photographer, so the speed really didn't mean much. It had the same sensor that I have, so I didn't upgrade to the newest model. Instead, I bought a used camera that was one version better than the one I had, and I saved more than half the price of a new body.
Question 3. What can you do with the new body that you can't do with your current one? When I wanted an upgrade, one of the biggest features I was looking for was in-camera stabilization. The camera I had didn't have it, but the next model did. With my old body, in lower light I had to put it on a tripod, and I can go lower with my newer camera. My newer camera was released in 2016, but it does stuff that my older camera didn't. It has in-body camera stabilization. It has bluetooth. It has a larger buffer. But other than that, it's virtually the same as my older camera. They operate almost the same, so my backup and my main camera are set up the same. I can go from one to the other seamlessly, which I would not have been able to do with the latest and greatest that came out this year in 2019.
Question 4. What type of photography do you do and does the newer camera body improve it? If you are a sports photographer or a wildlife photographer, a fast focusing, fast shutter, high buffering camera is what you need to do the job. If you are a portrait photographer, those qualities really don't matter. If you're a stills photographer, all the video features really don't matter. If you are a portrait photographer, a full frame sensor might make sense to create those shallow depth-of-field portraits. If you are an astro photographer, a full-frame sensor might make more sense for the low-light capabilities.
 Photographers Eye
Question 5. Do I need a full-frame sensor or will a crop sensor do? When I switched from a full-frame Nikon D800, one of the concerns I had was would I lose image quality. I can say that, for the type of photography I do, I didn't. The Nikon I was using was a 36mp camera, and it was an awesome camera. I went to a smaller 24mp camera, and I really couldn't see the difference. It did take a long time for me to make the decision to do it, but I put photos side by side and, other than size, there was no difference in quality for me. I believe that for most people sensor size doesn't matter, and you can create great photos with smaller sensors. If you specialize in something that a larger sensor might matter, like astro photography or portrait photography or plan on printing really large, you might need a full-frame sensor. But if you're a hobbiest like I am, the crop sensor works. I can still do astro photography and portraits and have no problem doing them with a crop sensor.
If you ask yourself these questions and are honest, you can save yourself some money and you can put that extra money that you saved into lenses! I believe that lenses are where you should invest your money. Buy the best lenses that you can afford. The next blog will be about lenses and how I have mine set up. Yes, a little GAS is in my lenses also. Keep shooting!
Carolina Beach Sunset
Photography is more than just a hobby for me. Photography got me out. It got me out of the house. It got me out of my shell and got me to be more creative. Photography and I have been dancing partners for quite a while. When I was a teenager in the mid-70s, I got my first real camera, a Pentax K1000 35mm film camera. I was self-taught, which means I made lots of mistakes and ruined lots of film. We didn't have any YouTube then or videos to learn from, so I had to learn from books and magazines. I mainly took photos of friends and family and some scenic stuff and would send the film out and wait a week to see what I got.
 Dice
When I joined the military, my camera came with me, but I didn't use it that much and actually sold it at one point and was without a camera for a time until I bought another Pentax that I still have to this day and use from time to time. But again, it was family and friends, and holidays was the only time I used it. I dabbled in black-and-white photography and even had a dark room rig that I set up in the bathroom. Then something happened. Digital came out! My first digital camera was a Kodak point and shoot, only a couple of megapixel, and I kept upgrading and experimenting with photography. A lot of table top photography, lighting, and the occasional family portrait. When my daughter got pregnant, that was all the excuse I needed to get a DSLR, and then my photography world blossomed. I started shooting all over the house doing macro work and then out to the local State Park. Before I knew it, I had
 Ava
gotten a map and started my journey to the outside, outside of my house and the comfortable environment that I was used to. I started with festivals. There are all kinds of festivals that you can visit, especially in the spring and fall, and they got me traveling every weekend going here and there. This also got my wife going with me which was a plus. Then I started a quest to visit every state park in NC. I had a map and marked them off as I got to them. My photography started to change then also. I started doing more landscapes, more trails, and started hiking at age 50. What a time to start.
My hiking started as a way to get there. To get to the photographs that other photographers were not going the extra mile to get to. But then I started to enjoy the hike almost as much as the photography, but not quite. As the hikes got longer and more frequent, my son and I started thinking about hiking and staying overnight, and we started car camping (camping where you drive to the spot, pitch a tent, and camp) and then we could hike from there.
 Goose Creek Grass
That made the farther places easier to go to; because of the longer drive, spending the night just made sense. We would go to places like Pilot Mountain State Park that is about a four-hour drive from the house. Then we got the idea, why don't we go somewhere and backpack in (all your food, tent, clothes in a backpack) and then backpack out? So we started training. It's much more difficult to hike with a heavy pack on your back. Our goal was a 10-mile in and out loop at Doughton Park, a national park in the mountains. So we started hiking and increasing our mileage and weight on our packs until we were ready. And we did it! We drove up on a cold night, slept in the parking lot, and hiked out at first light. It was colder than expected (our water froze). But we had a great time, and I got some photos that I wouldn't have gotten if I had just stopped by the road and took a shot. That's how I got into backpacking; it was photography that got me out.
Wine glass Splash
During all the hiking and photography from the start of digital I found the local photography club. I had been living in this town for almost 15 years when, while I was on Facebook, I found a former troop of mine from when I was in the military. I was looking at his Facebook page and noticed that he was one of the officers of the club. I didn't even know a club existed. So I got in touch with him and went to the next meeting. And a new world opened up. I could talk about photography and people's eyes wouldn't roll back in their heads. We could talk about photography for an hour or so, and it was great! I really got into the club, went on all the outings and workshops, and really enjoyed it. The first Help Portrait I went to they had me take some of the portraits. I had never used lights before, but they kinda set me up and then I was taking portraits. Not very good ones, but I was doing it. I was talking and taking photos of people I din't know.
The club got me out. Photography got me out of my shell. It has gotten me to do this blog, this website, and post photos online. Now, my gear has changed over the years and what I shoot has changed a little, but my love for photography has never changed, even when I let it go for a while. Now I'm closer to 60 than I am 50, and I still get excited when going out on a photo shoot, whether it's to a festival or a waterfall, sunrise or sunset. Whether I'm in a big city or a secluded bay, I get excited and still feel creative. Now, I don't really make any money. Every now and then I sell something. But photography has given me more than money; it has given me a way out! So be like me and get out! Keep shooting!
Well, I went on my camera club's annual fall colors workshop. I didn't get to go to the full week-long workshop, but I did get to go for a few days and had a blast taking photos and fellowshipping with good photography friends. We stayed in a log cabin house that was very large and nice where the dozen of us stayed. We had an itinerary of places to go all week long rising up early in the morning and coming home late. These workshops are really "work," but they are fun also. Waterfalls and fall colors are our goal, but we try to do new things also. This year we did light painting with waterfalls which was a new adventure for us, but it turned out well. I always try new things while on the workshop and really decided to go fully to mirrorless and to a crop ASP-C sensor on one of these workshops. Every year I have failures and successes and really learn a lot from both. I had no real hard failures but had a couple of surprise successes.
The first was my lens arrangement that I was to take and use while there. My main lens, a Sony-Zeiss 16-70 f4 lens, didn't change. It was wonderful and I got some great shots with it. It had a polarizer on it most of the time because of shooting around water and we had some rain that would have produced a lot of glare. I probably used this lens 80-90% of the time, and it was sharp and quick. My long or telephoto lens was a 70-200mm f4 Canon L lens, a great lens, and it really worked well. I am using a Metabones adapter to fit it to my camera and it works well. Maybe not as fast as a native lens, but it works well for me and it's sharp. I brought a Sony 35mm f1.8 and I never took it out of the bag. Then it comes to my real dilemma, which wide angel to use. I originally intended to use only a Rokinon 12 mm f2 lens but then thought about the Sony 10-18mm f4. I went back and forth many times, packing one to go on the trip and then the other. I finally decided to take both since I was driving and storage space was not a priority. I did take both but only used one, the Sony 10-18 f4. It was sharp, fast, and made beautiful photographs. I was very pleased. This is a lens that I haven't used too much before and was actually thinking of selling it. But no more. It will be in my bag for a long time. It gave me some of my best photographs of the whole trip. The Rokinon is a great lens, and I will keep it for astro photography because of its wide aperture.
My next biggest experiment was to go without a laptop and only use an iPad. This was not the success that I thought it would be. I was using a 10.5 inch iPad Pro 2018 model. It worked well enough but wasn't the laptop that I enjoy using. I also like to use Luminar 3 photo editing software in conjunction with Lightroom, and I couldn't use it with my iPad. I was also using Lightroom or the mobile version of Adobe Lightroom Classic, which is not as strong of a program as the classic version. I joined the iPad with a WD Passport SSD Pro which is a Wifi enabled SSD hard drive that I could hook up the iPad with. The drive worked well. The only problem I had was operator error, but I learn quickly. The iPad did work okay, but I much prefer editing on a laptop. My travel laptop is a MacBook Air and, although not as powerful as a MacBook Pro, it does work well and is lighter. So on my next big outing the MacBook Air will be the computer of choice for my editing of images.
My next experiment was to use screw-on filters instead of the 100mm Lee filter system I have used in the past. These filters are a smaller and more compact choice and match up well with my Sony mirrorless system. The brand that I used was Breakthrough Photography Circular Polarizer and Neutral Density filters. I got one set of polarizer and a 3 stop Neutral Density at 72mm, the largest size of any lens I have, and use step-up rings to attach to different lenses. I only used this combination one time as it was cloudy or overcast, and I only needed my polarizer most of the time. It worked very well and will be my system of choice for my small mirrorless system.
My last experiment was letting my camera sync with my phone via bluetooth to get GPS information. This was the biggest success of all of my photo experiments. It worked flawlessly, and all of the photos that I took with my Sony A6500 I can go to the map section of Lightroom and see where I took them. This is a very useful tool to have in my toolbox. As a landscape photographer, I can easily forget where I took a photograph. But with the GPS info embedded into the metadata, I won't have this problem again.
The only thing that didn't work well was that I had to leave early and couldn't stay the whole week long. It was a sad day when I had to drive home the last day knowing all of my photo buddies were still there having a photo adventure. One of the best things I ever did was to join a photography club. If you ever have the chance, please do so. If you live in eastern NC, come visit GAPC (Goldsboro Area Photography Club). We meet once a month and have workshops and outings every month. We have one big trip per year (week long), and we participate in Help Portrait, a program where photographers give back to their community. Well, that's enough for now. Get out and shoot!
Wow! It's been a long time since my last posted blog. I've had a lot of family things going on and really haven't had the time or the motivation to do a blog. It's been kind of a ho-hum year, but I did just get back a couple of weeks ago from a trip to Washington DC where my wife and I spent the week. I took a little point and shoot with me, a Canon G7X Mark II, a 20 megapixel one-inch sensor camera that did well for most of my snapshots, and I only missed my Sony a couple of times. This coming weekend I'm going to the mountains with my camera club and am really looking forward to shooting again. Really the DC trip got me out of my funk and got me motivated to shoot again. I did add a camera to my photography kit, a Sony A6500 that I bought used from a club member that upgraded to the full sensor Sony. I have been shooting the Sony A6300 which has the same sensor as the A6500, but the newer camera has a couple of other features that I was looking for. The first was the in-body stabilization (IBS). I have been wanting this for a while. Also, it has a touch screen, but it's only used for moving
the focus point around. I got spoiled using the Canon point and shoot because the touch screen is very nice and versatile on it, unlike the Sony. It also has bluetooth, something I didn't know I wanted. Seems I can use this feature to pair to my phone and send the GPS coordinates to my camera so they can be recorded in the metadata of the photo. Very cool. The newer Sony can
also buffer more shots than the 6300 can that could be helpful. So anyway back to the trip to the mountains. Here are some of the things that I will be trying out while there.
The GPS function that I mentioned before I will try, and hopefully it will work seamlessly. On my test today it worked well. So I hope to have GPS on all of my photos in the future to help me figure out where I took that shot. My lens selection is a little strange this year. I'm taking four lenses, and all of them are by different manufactures. Here is a list of them, from smallest to largest focal length: The Rokinon 12mm - This is a very sharp lens with a 2.8 maximum aperture. It is an inexpensive lens but very sharp when in focus, and it is a manual-focus lens. The Sony 35mm - This is
the equivalent to a 50mm lens in full frame and is very sharp. I'll use this when I really need a wide aperture. The next is my favorite lens. The Sony-Zeiss 16-70mm lens with an 4.0 maximum aperture - Probably 80-90 percent of all of my photos fall in this 24-105mm full-frame range. This is a very sharp lens, small and compact. My longest lens is the Canon 70-200f4 L lens. This is the only Canon lens with the "L" markings that is not f2.8 or wider. This is an excellent lens and gives me a full-frame focal length of 100-300. I got this lens on a sale, but it's awesome. I use the Metabones adapter with this lens. It's not as fast as the Sony, but I don't shoot a lot at these longer focal lengths. Which brings me to the next thing. I'll have a true backup camera in the A6300 and may shoot both of them while out with a telephoto on one and my 16-70 on the other.
Another thing I'll be doing different this year is that I'm not going to take a laptop with me. That's right, no laptop on a photography trip. This year I'll be taking an iPad pro with Lightroom CC Mobile on it to make edits. I'll be using a Western Digital SSD drive that has WiFi to back up all of my photos from my SD cards. I can view them on my iPad and transfer and edit the ones I want in Lightroom CC for Instagram and such. Then when I get home I can Import all of the photos into my Lightroom Classic Catalog and go through them. This will be a big change for me this year and is still just a trial. I have a MacBook Air where I can do the same thing with Lightroom CC Mobile, but I wanted to try the iPad this year and see how it works.
Other than photography news, I have been doing some hiking and camping this year and have taken a couple of backpacking trips. I took a couple of solo trips, one with my dog Forrest to Raven Rock State Park and one to Uwharrie National Forest. I took a couple of other backpacking trips with my son Mark, one to South Mountain State Park and
one to Uwharrie National Forest. I have lost 30 pounds this year so far, and my knee has been doing well. I have been making a lot of our camping equipment like hammocks, bags, stuff sacks, and even made a tent for Forrest to sleep in, so I have been busy sewing. Yes, I know it sounds funny, a 50ish-year-old man sewing, but I'm pretty good at doing this kind of sewing. I have some more projects for this year. I plan on making a winter tarp for my hammock and maybe a hiking fanny pack. Yep, I said it, fanny pack. I had six trips planned and places reserved to take my little teardrop trailer camping, but we only got to take it on one trip to Cedar Point National Recreation Area down on the coast. All of our other trips either got rained out or something else got in the way of us going. I need to start planning for next year's trips.
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