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On a recent trip to San Diego, I visited a couple of the wild animal parks. I wanted to be able to take some closeup shots of the animals, but do not have any telephoto lenses in my arsenal. After hearing the online rental company lensrentals.com mentioned on the TWIP podcast I decided to rent a lens from them.

Looking at their homepage, it became quickly apparent that they have all of the popular lens choices for all of the major camera bodies. According to the website they carry 253 different lenses, as well as camera bodies and other accessories. On the product pages for the individual lenses there are general descriptions and links to full reviews. After reading up on some choices I settled on the Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L lens.

After creating an account, and going through the quick, automated phone number verification, I was selecting the reservation dates and placing my order. After placing my order I received an acknowledgment email. A couple of hours into the next business day I received another email indicating the order had been approved and the lens would ship two days before the start date for my rental.

When ship day came I received an email with the tracking information, and two days later had the package in my hand. In the box was the lens and hood packed in a soft carrying case, as well as the return shipping label. The lens was in great condition and worked flawlessly while in my possession.

The day before I was due to return the lens I received an email reminder. I packed the lens back in the box it was received in and affixed the return label. A quick drive to the nearby Fedex location had the lens on its return journey. A couple of days later I received an email acknowledging the lens had been received and that completed the rental process.

Overall, the process was extremly smooth and the lens was in great condition. I was very happy with the simplicity of the transaction and will be using them for future rentals. Additionally, they offer damage insurance for a small fee, which is worth the peace of mind. They will also contact you via Twitter if you prefer that to receiving the information emails.

When looking through the viewfinder I have the tendency to focus solely on the subject.  I focus on the subject, position it in the frame, and then take the photo.  This is a good start but something is missing.  The subject is not the only part of the shot.  The area around the subject, up to the edges of the frame can make up a large portion of the photo.  Unless you maintain a vigilante watch of these areas, the intruders will creep in. 

I have been trying to create a habit of pausing for a moment before pressing the shutter button.  In this moment I scan the edges of the viewfinder, looking for obstructions and other intruders.  If necessary I can remove any intruders or adjust the composition. 

Hopefully as this becomes more of a habit, I will end up with less photos like this one.  Had I taken the time I could have removed the glass and taken a much better portrait.

After taking my fair share of harshly, unevenly lit shots from the internal flash in my Rebel XSi I had begun to lust after something more.  After doing some reading on the subject I settled on the Canon Speedlite 430EX II.  Last week it was added to my gear bag and a couple of days I got to use it.

I attended a birthday party in the side room of a dimly lit restaurant.  The room was dim enough where shooting without a flash would have been noisy at best and the room was too large for the weak internal flash.  It was time for the Speedlite.

Admittingly my flash knowledge ends after turning it on when its dark.  As such I left it on the auto ETTL II mode and bounced the flash off the ceiling, which working amazingly well.  Practically every shot was exposed well, with a balanced, soft light.

While I left most of the flash options set to the defaults I do have a compatible camera, allowing for me to control the flash options through the camera menu.  It was great being able to review and adjust the options in the same menu that I use to adjust the camera options.  It also spares me the frustration of trying to adjust setting on the limited LCD on the back of the flash.

A nice surprise was the auto focus assist beam.  In low light situations the flash can emit a grid of red light to assist in auto focusing.  This is leaps and bounds better than the flash strobe the internal flash uses.  It is far less distracting and much faster as well.

Overall I was highly impressed with this flash on its first real adventure and I look forward to learning more about its uses and playing with its options.  Here are a couple of photos from the party for you to get an idea of how well the flash works.

For my second weekly assignment I took a trip to Descanso Gardens.  I figured I would take a lot of close up pictures of flowers so I decided to shoot using my 50mm f/1.8 lens to allow for the best control of depth of field. I decided I would focus on getting some good shots of isolated subjects with non-distracting backgrounds. I went during the afternoon so the lighting started pretty harsh but got better as the day went on.

I didn't start these weekly assignments to do a "moral of the story" every time I go out shooting but there was another lesson learned on this trip. For the first 20 shots I had the aperture set around 2.0 with a very small distance between the subject and the camera. This created an extremely shallow depth of field. So shallow in fact that very little of the flower would be sharp and most of it would be blurry. It was hard to notice on the little LCD screen on the back of the camera so it went unnoticed for awhile, but was ultimately corrected.

Ultimately, the trip was very enjoyable and I got some good shots. A couple of my favorites are below with a some more in the weekly assignments gallery.

I mentioned in a previous post that in an effort to shoot more I was going to assign myself weekly "assignments".  Last Saturday, for my first weekly assignment I took the subway to Union station and walked around the surrounding area including Olvera Street and Philippe's.  Over the next two hours I took approximately 75 photos, most of them of the architecture as I wandered around.

Once I got home I made quick work disposing of the poorly exposed and blurry photos.  When I reviewed the remaining photos I quickly came to notice a common issue with a majority of the remaining photos.  The shots lacked any real subjects. 

I had very obviously just pointed my camera at things as I wandered by them, spending very little time thinking of framing or composition.  The pictures were pictures for the sake of taking pictures.  They told no story and had nothing of interest.  Looking at them my eye did not know what to look at, leading it to wander the shot.  I do feel I got a handful of decent to good photos.  Some I adjusted to black and white or performed some other act of pixel pushing, and this improved them a bit more. 

I have created a new section of my gallery to house the "picks" from these assignments.  The gallery will have additional photos that do not make it into my articles.  Below are my two favorite shots from the trip.  For the next assignment, I am hoping to make it to Descanso Gardens.

The fake tilt-shift effect is a quick process that can be applied in Photoshop (or another image manipulation program) to an image to make an image look like it was taken with an expensive tilt-shift lens. This can also cause the subject of the photo to look like it is a miniature. Here is a quick rundown on how to create the effect.

The first step is to select a good candidate photo. You are going to get the best results selecting a shot with a downward angle on the subject. Cityscapes taken from a high point are a good example of this. For this exercise, I selected a photo of Seattle taken from the top of the Space Needle.

Once you have the photo opened, enter into quickmask mode and create a mask using the gradient tool. You will want to use the gradient that fades out on both sides. Draw the gradient over the area that you want to be in focus. You do not need to worry about the gradient being straight. At this point you should have something like the picture below. Once this is done, exit quickmask mode and the mask will be converted to a selection.

We now want to apply a lens blur effect to emulate the shortened depth of field of the tilt-shift lens. Under the blur category in the filters menu select "lens blur". The exact settings you use will vary depending on the photo but something like the options here will get you into the ball park. I found that having the Radius and Blade Curvature options in the 30s usually looks pretty good.

The Brightness and Threshold options are not terribly important unless the photo was taken at night and has a lot of reflected light bokeh.  I would recommend leaving noise set to 0 unless htere is a particular look that you are aiming for.

Click OK to apply the filter.

Your photo should now look like mine does above, with the subject of the photo in focus and the rest now out of focus.

We now need to make a couple of adjustments to finish giving the photo that miniature look. Add a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer and increase the contrast. Adjusting the contrast up will increase the miniature look of your photo.  Additionally, you will probably want to bump up the brightness as well to give the photo the bright lighting typical of miniatures.

Once that is done, make another adjustment layer, this time for Hue/Saturation. Bump up the saturation some to give the strengthen the colors and remove some of the detail. This will give the image the look of typical miniatures that have solid colors. Once this has been done the effect is complete. If necessary crop the photo to your liking.

My finished result using these steps:

Before purchasing this lens the only lens I had available to me was the 18-55mm kit lens that came with my Canon Rebel XSi. I wanted to add a fast lens to my collection that would allow for good low light picture taking and also smaller depth of field. I saw this lens mentioned quite a bit and since it's priced under $100 I took the plunge. Did it fulfill the tasks I hoped it would?

For the most part it did. The image stabilization on the kit lens allowed me to hand hold low light shots without camera shake, but due to the slow shutter speed the subject needed to hold very still or they would be blurry. On the 50mm lens, the large aperture, allows for a shutter speed high enough for most subjects to not blur from movement.

The large aperture also allows for a smaller depth of field. This allows for better shots with the subject becoming isolated with the immediate foreground and background becoming blurred. The kit lens allowed for some subject isolation but nothing near the degree that is possible with the 50mm. Additionally with the 1.6 focal length modifier on the Rebel XSi the 50mm becomes the equivalent of an 80mm lens on a 35mm film camera, which is a good focal length for portrait work.

This lens also takes really sharp pictures. The 50mm lens has been around for 20+ years and the optics are pretty close to perfect. When the aperture is set to either extreme the photos get a bit soft but with that aside the photos are sharp and beautiful.

There are unfortunately a few downsides which can be expected from a lens that costs under $100. The first is the build quality of the lens. While the glass is high quality the body is made from all plastic. In my opinion this is a reasonable exchange for the low price point. Another downside is the ability of the auto focus. The auto focus is slow on this lens and it also has some problems focusing in really low light. This creates a bit of a rub as the large aperture makes it good for low light, but the auto focus performs poorly during these conditions. To add insult to injury the manual focus ring is really narrow making manual focus difficult at times.

Overall this lens works really well and for the low price point has a tremendous bang for the buck. While there are a couple of negatives with this lens, don't let that scare you away from one of the best deals around.

Here are a couple of samples I have taken with the lens. (Click for large version)