Photo Quickies

PhotoQuickie occasionally comes across photography links that we think are useful, but not at our current level of expertise. In today’s case, we read about Garry Winogrand’s street photography techniques but being slightly shy, we don’t feel comfortable behind the lens to attempt this on the street.

PhotoQuickie has often wondered why digital SLRs have much lower focal lengths than film SLRs. First though to be sure PhotoQuickie and our friends are on the same page; the focal length is the distance needed for a lens to focus the image onto the photo sensor.

For film cameras, PhotoQuickie sees lenses with focal lengths of say 35mm - 80mm while lenses made specially for digital SLRs have focal lengths in the 18mm - 55mm range. PhotoQuickie muses that the result should be similar and of that we are correct.

The reason is that on dSLRs, the photo sensor is smaller than a frame of 35mm film so the focal length of a dSLR lens must be multipied by a focal length multiplier to find out the equivalent 35mm focal length. For most Canon dSLRs this is 1.6, while for Nikon dSLRs this is 1.5. Which means that PhotoQuickie’s hypothetical 18-55mm digital lens is like a 28-80mm film lens in fact.

Read more about: Focal Length, Digital camera backs (bodies),

PhotoQuickie’s been scouring Ebay for accessories for our camera and found a spectacular deal on a UV filter. Which begged the question in our mind, what exactly do UV filters do? PhotoQuickie didn’t relish the though of spending $20 on shipping for something that we would hardly use.

So relying on the handy web, we googled UV filters and read up on a couple of sources. Our summary notes indicate that UV filters are useful to prevent over exposure of blues at high altitudes, and PhotoQuickie means high altitudes such as the top of mountains. PhotoQuickie doesn’t rub shoulders or other parts with the Mile High Club so UV filters don’t really seem to be useful for our digital work.

Bonus Quickie: PhotoQuickie’s older friends may use a UV filter to protect their lens from scratching, however most recent lenses use hard glass and have scratch-resistant coating, so the filter is not needed.

Read more about: UV, skyline and haze filters, discussion on using UV filters for protection (scroll down a bit)

PhotoQuickie’s noticed an interesting thing in our world, surprisingly many buildings seem to be influenced by the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Extremely skeptical about the sanity of this idea, we did some research into why the buildings centered in our photos were straight and those near the edges were crooked.

PhotoQuickie can happily confess that it is due to a phenomenon called Barrel Distortion and not a new trend in architecture. Quickly, barrel distortion makes the outer areas of our photos curved due to the spherical nature of the lens. Here’s a cropped example.

The building on the right is more or less straight (PhotoQuickie can assure you that we were not drunk while taking this picture), while there is a noticable gap seen in the blue rectangle between the building and the vertical line.

There is hardly anything that PhotoQuickie can do about our camera’s barrel distortion (aside from keeping it in mind when buying a new camera). For the photos on the other hand, we can doctor them with our favorite photo editing software. PhotoQuickie’s friends who are using Photoshop can try these easy tips from Ken Rockwell to fix up barrel distortion in their photos.

Read more about: Barrel Distortion,

PhotoQuickie has had mixed results using our flash indoors; either everything is washed out in bright, harsh light or our photo clearly shows the 5 meters of nothingness in front of the camera and darkness elsewhere.

Here’s a trick PhotoQuickie uses to get around the problem when taking still photos. We take a test picture with the flash off to get our camera to pick a suitable shutter speed. Then we flip over to shutter priority mode and set the shutter speed to that speed (or a little slower). Finally, we put our camera on a flat surface and use that as a tripod to take our picture without the flash.

That usually gives us the image similar to what we see with our own eyes. On the occasion that our photos still come out blurry (thanks no doubt to PhotoQuickie’s lack of surgeon hands), here’s a meta-trick.

We use our camera’s two second self-timer when taking these shots so the vibrartions of our fingers don’t shake the camera when the shutter is open. The normal ten second self-timer would definitely also work, though we think that standing there and watching our camera for ten seconds would get us some interesting stares.

When PhotoQuickie first started getting into photography, we heard of people spending a lot of money to buy a SLR. Aside from a larger price tag and not being able to fit their camera snugly in their coat pocket, we really had no idea what the difference was. An impromptu survey of our friends revealed the same confusion.

SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex and cameras of this type have a single mirror that reflects the image up into the optical viewfinder. When a picture is taken, the mirror flips out of the way so the image is projected into the photo sensor.

Why does this matter to us budding photographers? Well, the mirror lets PhotoQuickie see exactly what our camera will capture (no parallax problems!). Aside from that, SLRs can generally use interchangable lenses which are of higher quality and can allow for finer focusing. Perfect for the blury background effect that PhotoQuickie loves.

Read more about: SLR, Choosing which dSLR to buy.

PhotoQuickie likes using the macro mode on our camera to photograph high contrast things up close (like flowers or food) and being an old-fashioned sorta folk, we’ve always used the optical viewfinder to see the world.

Looking at our results, we found our photos less than spectacular as though we couldn’t hold the camera steady enough to frame our objects. Unbeknownst to us, our world was suffering from an effect called parallax.

Parallax happens when PhotoQuickie views something off-center so our perspective is different than what our camera sees. When taking macro photography, the effect of parallax is greater since you are up close and personal.

PhotoQuickie has learned that there are two ways around this, we will either use a SLR camera, or take our macro photography using the LCD instead of the optical viewfinder. We think the latter fits our budget better.

Read up on: Parallax, Macro Photography,

PhotoQuickie has been mucking around the last little while with our camera, learning the ropes in the hopes that one day we can take photos good enough to show our friends & family without running away in shame.

Rather than relying on our suspect memory, we thought the best way to remember all the do’s and do not’s would be to blog it; with a side benefit of sharing our knowledge with the rest of the world. So Photo Quickies was born to provide tips, tricks and gotchas for beginner and amateurs learning the art of photography.

We blog searched the web for other blogs we could learn from, but found a lot of places telling us about the latest 50 megapixel camera. PhotoQuickie doesn’t have money to buy a new thousand dollar camera every week, so you will hardly see equipment reviews or news here. If you do want to learn how to take better photos then bookmark us or subscribe to our RSS feed.

And of course, PhotoQuickie is a beginner too so if you learn of any tips or have a killer tip to share, shoot us a note at tips@photoquickies.com.