Friday 3 August 2007

Available light

Sea front at Sheringham, Norfolk

I'm currently going through the long process of creating an online presence - essential for any photographer who wants to show their work and maybe get some commissions too. The amount of websites set up for the pro and amateur photographer to access is mind-blowing but one of the best is lightstalkers.org.

Lightstalkers offer a place for like minded photographers to show their work and get feedback but for some reason its a website that seems really difficult to use. I've just spent an hour or two trying to upload some images to my gallery....with no result. The site just won't let me do it. I suppose I'll have to try later but a website should be easy to use and for me, lightstalkers ain't!!

The shot of Sheringham above was taken with my Nikon nikkor 35mm f2.0 lens which is a typical photojournalists lens - fast and sharp. 35mm lenses fall into the area of the wideangle but without the distortion you get with 28mm and 24mm wideangles. I use fixed lenses quite a bit but I'm also recognise the huge benefits of the zoom lens.

I love zoom lenses - modern zooms being far better than the older types of twenty years ago. Some photographers still believe that a zoom is inferior in quality to a fixed lenses (i.e 50mm or 135mm) but i think that's no longer true thanks to modern lens design. The Sigma and Nikon zooms i use with my cameras are pin sharp but i still use fixed lenses like the Nikon 35mm f2.0 simply because they are fast and can be useful in low light conditions.

An interesting experiment to do with a zoom is to keep it set on ONE lens setting, say 28mm, and photograph everything you come across by moving YOURSELF and not the lenses. you'll certainly learn a lot about perspective and framing images....its fun too!

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