I’ve narrowed down my hunt for a new prime lens to two. Neither are 50mm. The reason for that is that I find the 50mm lens to be too constricting. You need to be a good distance away from someone to capture more than just half their face with that. This is not helped by the fact that my camera, the Canon XTi, is not a full frame camera. It has a 1.6x crop factor, so the 50mm acts like an 80mm lens. That’s great for portraits in studio or outdoor situations where you have lots of breathing room. It’s awful when you’re in the same room of a house with the subject, or in a bar with them, or anywhere relatively close.

50mm is something of a sweet spot in photography, though. It’s close to the way the eye actually works. So to get to 50mm with my non-full frame camera, I need to get a lens closer to 35mm.

Thankfully, there are two viable options, both well reviewed.

The first is the Canon 35mm f/2 lens. It’s a hair slower at f/2 instead of f/1.8 (less than a third of a stop, I believe), but I don’t think I’ll ever notice. It’s the equivalent lens for a crop sensor camera, and I’m surprised it’s not talked about more often. The reviews at FredMiranda.com are pretty good, with an average 8.8 rating.

There IS a better lens — the Canon 35mm f/1.4L. It’s a professional lens, earning the “L” ranking for Canon’s system. This also means the price is nearly quadruple that of the f/2. So nevermind that.

Sigma makes a 30mm f/1.4 lens that is also getting good reviews at FredMiranda.com, which is where I go to start any lens purchase hunt. It has great reviews from a variety of Real World users for every lens.

In any case, the Sigma is an extra $100 over the Canon, but it’s also a touch wider and a half stop faster. It’d be the fastest lens I’ve ever used. And it’s still about the same price as the Canon 50mm f/1.4. I considered that lens, too, but I’m shying away from 50mm.

Both lenses have had complaints about being soft when wide open, and both have had some auto focus difficulty, according to some voices on the ‘net.

So it’s a toss-up. I can actually get the Canon at the local camera store for a hair under $300, while the Sigma is over $400. If they’re roughly equivalent lenses, then Canon wins handily. But the Sigma does let in more light, which might be a great thing to have in some situations. And it includes a lens hood! (OK, so that’s a $10 advantage. No big whoop.)

The more reviews I read, the more confusing the whole situation becomes. I’m not averse to third party lenses. My Tamron lens is my work horse. So which to go with? I don’t know just yet. I’m just thinking out loud today.

If you’ve ever wondered what the inside of a camera lens looks like, here’s mine:

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My Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens died this weekend. It’s my fault. I jammed my camera into my camera bag and heard a sound. That little plastic Nifty Fifty was hiding in the corner and my camera broke it apart. While it’s interesting to see the inside of a lens, it’s not something you want to see on YOUR lens. EVER.

At the same rate, the Nifty Fifty is a notoriously cheap lens. It’s total plastic, and breaks easily. I just learned that lesson personally. It sucks.

And because it’s so cheap, it’s not worth sending out for fixing, because the usual minimum repair charge is more than the cost of the lens, itself.

So, new lens? Yes. I definitely want one. I want a fast prime lens. There’s nothing like the look of a prime lens. I don’t know all the physics reasons for it. They’re a simpler design, so there’s less stuff between the light and my camera’s sensor, I guess. And with that wide open aperture, it’s a great lens for low light. They also tend to be cheaper than zoom lenses, not that any lens in the world is actually “cheap.” So, what to do, what to do.

Tomorrow: The Options.

The number one mistake I think most people make in their photographs is in not considering the backgrounds. They can detract from the focal point of a picture or just plain clutter it up with useless detail. Even worse is when a pole appears to be sticking out of someone’s head because the subject is standing in front of a traffic sign or a phone pole.

I don’t think half my pictures would be as good as they are if I had instead been sitting on the floor in front of the stage. All the pics would then have been fighting the busy lighting patterns and colors of the central “Wiggly Circus” display behind the performers. By being to the side of the stage, where the backgrounds for all the pics would be the dark seating area that they didn’t even sell tickets to, I ensured the ability to get flat plain black backgrounds, thus focusing on the performers.

The one hang-up I did have, though, was the speaker located on the near corner of the stage. I had to fight my way around that quite often, mostly in the wider shots. There’s a skill to using foreground elements in landscape photography, but that’s not what I was going for that day.

There’s no perfect position. If I were in the front row on the floor level, all my pics would be up the Wiggles’ noses.

Strangely enough, there were open seats in the first three rows of my section. Only one parent took her kids down there. If I weren’t blocked seven seats in, I might have taken a quick walk down for a couple different pictures, too.

Two equipment issues popped up at the concert:

Like I said, I didn’t have my battery grip attached to the camera. That meant I was operating on one battery’s worth of power instead of two. It was a fresh battery, so I wasn’t worried too much. In the end, it wasn’t a problem. I only lost one bar of power through the whole concert. I guess not using the flash helped. I also turned down the brightness of my LCD screen. It needn’t be so bright, after all. I was in a dark concert hall. And that brightness is a notorious battery drain.

The second thing turned out to be the bigger challenge. I only had one 8 gigabyte memory card in my camera. And it already had 100 pictures on it, only a few of which hadn’t been previously transferred to the computer. Still, that left room for another 600 – 700 pictures, so no big deal, right?

I wound up deleting by hand all of those pictures on the card that I didn’t need. And my final frame was shot during the curtain call at the end of the show. I could have used another dozen frames or so, but I don’t think I missed much. If I had brought my 2 GB card in with me, I probably could have filled it up. I slowed down a bunch in the last 15 minutes of the concert.

Interestingly, my camera tells me that an 8GB card should hold just over 700 RAW pictures, at 10 megapixels. I ended up stuffing almost 800 pictures on the card before I was done. I imagine the file sizes were smaller because half of every image was just inky blackness? Maybe?

Next: Backgrounds are important! That should be the final photographic post in this saga. I might have one last post about the Wiggles, themselves, though…

The final good picture I took of the concert

Always shoot in manual.

Use aperture priority to get the general gist of where you’re shooting, but then switch to manual. Why? Aperture Priority mode blows out the highlights every time. Try exposure compensation if you want (and I did, to the tune of two stops), but it will still blow out pixels where the spotlights hit the performers square in the face and chests.

Shooting in manual and playing with shutter speeds helps. I could choose a shutter speed twice as fast and get a much better picture. With less light being let in, the dark background would go black, helping to isolate the Wiggle, and those highlights wouldn’t blow out. They’d look more like plain old studio lights.

I went from shooting 1/60th of a second in some cases to 1/320th and 1/200th. And the pictures were sharper and better exposed. The Image Stabilization of the lens helped a bunch, too. I could never have pulled off those shots without it. At 300mm, the image looks very shaky through your viewfinder if you don’t have IS turned on.

The astute photographic minds amongst you realize I’m breaking a cardinal rule of photography already, the reciprocal rule — that your shutter speed should be one over the focal length of your lens. On my 1.6x crop sensor camera, a 300mm lens extends out to 480mm. So I should be at 1/500th of a second speed to guarantee sharp images. That wasn’t at all possible. I kept my elbows propped up on my knees and the camera pressed hard against my face to help steady it, but that’s the best I could do. Also, don’t breathe while shooting.

Take this picture, for example:

Slow shutter speed leads to blur and blowouts

It’s shot in aperture priority, which only gave me 1/60th of a second. That gives you the motion blur. Even in “Rock-a-Bye Bear,” you need something faster. Perhaps even worse, check out Sam’s shirt or Jeff’s face. They’ve gone completely white. The highlights are blown out completely. That data is not recoverable. Trust me, I tried.

On the other hand, I went manual for the next shot:

In manual mode, you can control for more variables

It’s 1/320th of a second at 160mm. So it passes the reciprocal rule, keeping everything sharp, despite a fair amount of movement in the scene. And since I was controlling the shutter speed and aperture, both, I kept the highlights from blowing out. I did have to nudge the “Recovery” slider in Lightroom to the right a little bit, but no big deal. I didn’t lose any date in the highlights. The shadows may be lost, but that’s the compromise I made when I took the picture. I made the decision to let them become inky blackness. I don’t need to see the empty seats behind the stage. They’re just clutter.

I chimped constantly. I know it’s not what you’re “supposed” to do, but the light was changing constantly and it’s not like I could ask the Wiggles to redo a song so I can get the exposure right on Dorothy the Dinosaur.

I also ignored the histogram. It’s pointless in this situation. I’m not trying to evenly light the scene. I recognize that what I’m photographing is going to pin to the left side — mostly black. And if it overexposes, I could see the blinkies on my display. So why bother with it?

For slightly larger versions of the pictures in this post, click on the images.

I read up on concert photography prior to going to the show. (IShootShows.com has some awesome information. Start there.) I knew I didn’t have the equipment for it, but was prepared to give it a shot, anyway. All the concert photographers will tell you to have a relatively new camera with great high-ISO performance, and lenses that are at least f/2.8, if not wider. Even better: Shoot prime lenses.

Me, I had a nearly-five year old model Canon XTi camera, one 50mm f/1.8 prime lens, and a 70-300mm f/4-5.6 zoom lens.

Uh oh.

But two things work in my favor with that: First, I had a great seat. We were off to the right side of the stage, eight rows off the floor, just about even with the front of the stage. So, basically, we were just over eye level with the Wiggles, and not that terribly far away. My 50mm lens would just squeeze in the entire stage. My 70-300mm lens would give me portraits of people close up, and full body images of performers at the far end of the stage.

Second, Lightroom has good noise reduction features. LR3 is amazing, from what I’ve seen, but I don’t have it yet. (Won’t work on my ancient PowerPC-chipped Mac.) But LR2 does the job just swell, thanks. Plus, I don’t plan on blowing any of these images up that large, so I don’t need them to be so clean.

I had to shoot the entire concert at ISOs 800 and 1600 (mostly the latter) but I got images that were surprisingly usable. Plus, it’s the Wiggles: They light up the whole stage. And I’m not trying to get pictures of the people in their seats where it’s dark. I’m happy to have them disappear.

Still, shutter speeds weren’t always super fast, so I had to do two things to compensate:

First, I shot in burst mode. For every picture I wanted, I’d take three, figuring one of them would come out sharp enough.

Second, I chose my moments. Having watched the Wiggles concerts before, I knew some of what I was in for. I knew the poses that specific Wiggles would hold. I knew where in the song the most movement would be and so should avoid those spots. So choosing more pictures of people closer to me (more open f/stop at closer distances on my telephoto zoom) at times when they’d strike a pose was a big help.

But I still had one LARGE lesson to learn, and it’s the one that hurt the most. I’ll discuss that on Monday. (CLIFFHANGER!)

I wasn’t able to get a photo credential to the show, but I didn’t really try, either. My efforts were limited to a desperate Hail Mary attempt on Twitter the night before. Surprisingly, a Wiggles publicist responded, letting me know that the Wiggles shows are camera friendly, so it wouldn’t be a problem. Oh, and Anthony seems to have shaved his head on tour and we haven’t seen that back in Australia yet, so if you get a pic of that, could you pass it over?

I love Twitter.

Not that I didn’t believe her, but we all know the hassles of concert security these days. Looking on IZODCenter.com, the home page for the concert venue, I saw that cameras which were “small” and “nonprofessional” were allowed in. Technically, Canon doesn’t think my camera is professional-level, nor is any of my glass of the white variety of “L” lens. (I am not eligible for Canon Professional Services on any level, so I proudly claim amateur status here.)

I hedged my bets and attached my tiny 50mm lens to the front of my camera, took off the battery grip to make it smaller, and slung it around my neck to get through the front gates. I couldn’t look like more of a point-and-shoot father that way.

The funny thing is, the concert had NO security. Maybe they didn’t want to waste time searching all those diaper bags coming through the door. (I hid my telephoto zoom lens at the bottom of the diaper bag.) Maybe they figure it’s a small kids’ concert, so who’d want to bother?

I’m not sure whether to be grateful for this, or scared, to tell you the truth.

But I was able to attach my long lens, sit back in my seat, and take pics through the whole concert without anyone looking at me twice. At one point, I think Anthony was pointing at me, but I can’t prove that. Odds are better there was a kid with a sign sitting behind me that I didn’t know about.

And, yes, Anthony’s head was shaved clean. At separate points in the concert, Captain Feathersword punctuated the point, referring to Anthony as Daddy Warbucks and Jean-Luc Picard.

Tomorrow: Equipment concerns

Ferris Wheel at Night

This picture was taken at 8:30 p.m., about a half hour after official sunset time. The sky looks pitch black, but it’s really still a dark blue. Ramp up your ISO high enough, and you’ll pick up that color in the sky.

You can even see some clouds in the sky in this image, as blurry or noisy as they might appear.

It would be a minor thing here, but I really wish I could have had the camera lower. Shooting at eye level with your subject can often make a BIG difference in the final image. Here, it wasn’t possible. I had a second or two to fire off a pic. Crouching would have meant losing the pic, so it’s a compromise. (ALL of photography is a compromise, you quickly learn.)

The big trick about shooting animals at zoos through fences is to put your glass close to the fence and shoot at a wide open aperture. The fence disappears.

Sadly, this trick doesn’t work while on a moving train where the fence is a few feet away. Still, look! BISON! MOOSE! Cool!

Bad Bird Backgrounds

Be aware of your backgrounds. They can ruin a pic. That garbage can behind the bird on the left is a killer.

I knew that going in, actually. I saw it there. But I thought I’d give the bird shot a chance. I could always crop heavily in, right? But the bird isn’t looking all that great when seen close up, either, so the whole thing is a wash. Still, it’s a good lesson to learn.

See more pics from my trip to the zoo all week at AugieShoots.com.

How to ruin a good pic: Overexposed Highlights

Lesson #1 of photography: Always check your settings before taking a picture. I forgot I had played with manual exposure at the last set of animals at the zoo before taking this pic. All my ostrich pics turned out way overexposed because I thought I was still in Aperture Priority mode. Whoops.

This is the only pic that was salvageable. The rest were far too blown out to recover any details in Lightroom with. Still, that hot spot in front of the bird’s beak destroys the pic.

The ramifications on this are insane.

Photoshop Content Aware Fill

My Canon XTi has done fine by me for the last couple of years, but it’s now a couple of generation old. Heck, I bought it when the price dropped as the next generation was announced. The XSi came out right after I bought the XTi, and now the T1i has supplanted that.

Some big changes have happened in those two years: Video has arrived in the digital SLR world. High ISO ranges are the norm now, supplanting the megapixel race that once dominated the attention span of camera buyers. There’s so much cool advanced stuff going on with cameras just a generation later or a step above my Canon Rebel (the 50D, for example) that it makes me itch.

The Canon 5D Mark II is the leader of the pack in Caon’s high ISO performance, and does remarkable video. It’s also full frame, and will run you about $2500. The Canon 7D is much cheaper ($1700), is still a crop factor sensor, but has even better video, similar low light performance, better focusing sensors, a built-in flash commander, and more. It’s my ultimate dream camera at the moment, but still three times the price I paid for my current camera.

So how about a rumor of a third camera to lust over at an even lower price point?

Let’s go to Canon Rumors, who’s skeptical enough on this particular rumor to place their highest THIS IS ONLY A RUMOR sticker on top of it. Don’t believe this one. It’s almost certainly not true.

Yeah, but isn’t it fun to speculate? Have fun with it? Drool over something that will likely never exist?

The rumor is for a 9D/Rebel XF camera that will be full frame. For $1000.

I’d almost be tempted to sell everything I have to upgrade to it, along with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. It would be a drastic shift in my photography, but how cool would it be?

All of my current lenses, I believe, will work on a full frame camera, actually, so I would have the option to keep them, but something has to pay for the camera.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the specs are right, and that this turns out to be more than a rumor. Just don’t hold your breath.

(Whoops, the link is dead. Seems the story had so little credibility that they just pulled it down. Still, fun to dream, isn’t it?)