lens

Christmas at f1.4

Main Street, Hawkshead Village. ©Neil Turner

Whilst enjoying a few days away with the whole family in the Lake District over the holidays I shot a few pictures for my own pleasure and for the family album. For no other reason than “I wanted to” most of them were taken at the maximum aperture that the lens could manage – which, given that I mostly used a 50mm f1.4, was f1.4!!! It was great to be away from the big city for a while and take in the countryside and wander through some small towns and villages.

This was taken in Hawkshead Village – a large part of which was refreshingly closed…

Some 11 year old thoughts on lens selection…

Choosing the right lens for the job – written in 2000 for http://www.DPReview.com and it still pretty much stands up today – which cannot be said for everything that I thought that I knew when I’d only been in the profession for 14 years!

There are two ways that you can choose which of your lenses to stick on the camera:

  • You can say “there’s my subject and here I am, let’s see which focal length on my zoom works best”.  Sometimes at sports matches and political events you have your position and that is that, or…
  • You could say “I want the effect that my experience tells me a 28mm lens will give me so I’ll select that focal length and move to the right position to make that happen”.

Either of these could be a valid option and, in many cases, the first is decided for you by circumstance. Most news photographers use zoom lenses because it makes sense to have fewer lenses when you are never quite sure what kind of work you will be doing on any given day.

Personally, I use a combination of both approaches. If a position forces me to choose a certain lens then I’m with option 1. Given complete freedom to shoot what I want I’d go with 2. More often than not I’ll go with, say a 24-70mm lens intending to shoot at the 24mm end and get in a position to shoot that way. I will shoot several frames and then start to move around, zoom in and out and shoot a variety of similar images, each with subtle differences. I try to make a point of shooting with just about every focal length available to me on every job. Sometimes I am right about lenses first time but often I’m not. What had seemed like an obvious task for the 28mm ends up being a spectacular 200mm shot and vice-versa but the result is that you often end up with images that are just that bit better.

I nearly always shoot on location so I cannot preplan every detail. Going equipped with a range of lenses is vital. Your choice of lens will depend on so many questions running through your mind. How is this image going to be used? Big, small, upright, horizontal, front page? Double page, back page, website, magazine or newspaper? Is it going to have copy running over it? Will it have more than one usage?

If I cannot answer any or all of those questions, then I’ll shoot every variation I can. Shall I start with a long lens, if it’s a portrait then being further away may relax the subject and I’ll get in with the wide when they are more comfortable. Background, what’s behind them? Can I use a change of lens get rid of a poor background?

Answering self-set questions and making compromises is the key to news photography. Choosing the right lenses helps to reduce the number of technical compromises that you are forced to take, giving you more time to make the creative compromises that you want to make.

How often do you service your gear?

How often do you get your cameras, lenses or lights cleaned and serviced professionally? Every six months? Annually? Every other year? When things go wrong? Sadly, for most professional photographers it is the last one – when the kit goes wrong and needs to be fixed. Almost all of them get their cars service every ten thousand miles or when the service warning light comes on. Over half will get their central heating boilers checked and cleaned every once in a while but their cameras, the equipment on which their livelihood depends seems to get overlooked.

“My lenses are soft, I’m switching to the other brand” is a cry we have heard regularly over the last coupe of years but is it that one major manufacturer has suddenly started to make bad lenses or is it that the daily wear and tear on even the toughest kit starts to have an effect on image quality?

If the fall off is gradual enough we don’t notice. A lens might go from “wow” through “acceptable” to “oh dear” in twenty stages over thirty months and still we only seek the help of a technician when it gets to “oops”.

Modern camera chips are capable of resolving every bit if detail that our lenses can deliver. A camera such as a Canon EOS5D MkII will show up every glitch and flaw in a lens’ performance in ways that film or smaller chipped cameras never could. It will also show up tiny errors in focusing that would have gone unnoticed in times gone by.

One of my cameras celebrates it’s third birthday next week and it will go away for it’s third service a week or two later. It isn’t particularly cheap but it is a bargain when you think how much I rely on that camera to perform on a daily basis. I have a nine-year old lens that has been to either Fixation orCanon CPS six times to get this or that checked and another seven-year old lens that has made five service trips.

I have always loved the line from “Only Fools and Horses” where Trigger the road sweeper says proudly that he has had the same broom for years but that it has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles. I don’t think that camera maintenance is quite that easy but the concept should apply.

Professional kit is closer to high performance cars and needs to be treated with a bit of TLC every once in a while.