Archive for December, 2009

Canon Lenses for Photographing Babies

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

There are many web sites where photographer can find tests and reviews of lenses. Some of these sites are listed below and this is no attempt to provide information about general performance of lenses. Instead, I am focusing on suitability of my lenses for baby photography.

General Thoughts

How I Work

I’m using full frame camera and the suitability of lenses described below is related to full frame cameras only. I never use flash and rely on fast lenses and high ISO performance of my camera.

Age

The requirements and usability of lenses change with the ability of the baby to move. When they start walking, the AF speed becomes more important, especially during the age when they can’t understand everything you say and any attempt to stop them or attract their attention only causes that they start running to you. This has been a challenge especially with my 85mm lens and to some extent with 50mm.

Focal Length

Most of my photographs are from indoors, a situation which usually calls for shorter fast lenses. For baby photography I have been using mostly 85mm, 50mm and 35mm focal lengths, in that particular order.

EF 17-40/4L

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Suitable for snapshots where it is necessary to get very close or where you need to include lots of background. The minimum aperture of 4 is limiting for indoors shots, but ok during daylight. You will often get close enough for the child to be able to reach the front element of the lens. Since the lens hood is shallow and won’t prevent the baby from actually reaching the glass, an UV filter is handy. If you are considering purchasing a wide angle zoom lens and plan to use it for baby photography, think about 16-35/2.8 II, which is more practical for low light situations.

EF 35/1.4L

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This 35mm lens is considered by some the best wide angle lens from Canon, some reviewers rate it higher than 35mm Summilux R from Leica, but I found achieving sharp looking shots more complicated than with other lenses. Wide open it has shallow depth of field, but does not isolate the main subject the same way as longer fast lenses. This may create tricky situations on pictures with multiple isolated subjects, where some of the photographed subjects are not perfectly sharp and the viewer percepts this as bad focus. This may and may not be a problem for your type of photography. This lens can be hand hold at 1/30s and at wide open allows taking pictures with virtually no light. This is great especially during the period when baby works in 3 hours cycle and lots of interesting photo opportunities (feeding) happen in the middle of the night.

EF 50/1.4

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I found this lens practical especially in the hospital. It is relatively unobtrusive, light and universal enough to cover all the needs. This lens is fast, makes nice background blur and I would recommend this lens for baby photography to anyone on budget.

EF 85/1.2L II

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This is my most used lens. 85/1.2 closest focusing distance works great for adult portraits, but babies are smaller and you won’t be able to get close enough to fill the frame with head and shoulders of several months old baby. When they grow and start to move, this lens’ AF system is not fast enough to track their movement. Nevertheless, the fast aperture and background blur made it my favorite baby lens. The 85/1.8 is faster and focuses from closer distance and should be a great alternative.

EF 135/2L

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Greater shooting distance makes this focal length great for shooting unnoticed. Also great for details with blurred background. This lens is sharp wide open and despite the longer focal length can be used indoors. It’s sharpness and beautiful background blur make it tempting to use it wide open, but babies, especially those that can walk, may easily move after locking the focus and before the exposure and easily get out of the shallow depth of field. Using AI-servo, checking the shots for sharpness,multiple exposures and stopping down the lens will help mitigate the problem.

Other lenses

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The only other lens from my collection that I used for baby photography was 180/3.5 macro. I used it for some detail shots but also for shots where the 135mm was short. This is a great lens and the pictures are fine, but as one would expect, this lens is absolutely impractical for macro shots of moving subjects. Shorter macro lens would serve that purpose much better.

Useful Links

http://www.fredmiranda.com/reviews/index.php?cat=45

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/ISO-12233-Sample-Crops.aspx

http://www.16-9.net/lens_tests

 

Update – Two Years Old

At two years, ability to track the child and quickly frame became more important than anything else.

EF 16-35/2.8 II

This lens proves to be very practical for action shots. It allows taking reasonable pictures even if the kids get very close to you – and this happens a lot, especially if you talk to them. It also allows reasonable framing without cropping in post processing when the kid or kids quickly move back and forth.

 EF 16-35 II - illustration

 

EF 16-35 II - illustration

EF 35/1.4L

Still one of the favorite lenses for that purpose, especially in low light, like these pictures taken when my daughter befriended with our waitress in a restaurant and the other one from a hotel room.

 EF 35/1.4 - illustration

 

EF 35/1.4 - illustration

EF 85/1.2L

Great for portraits. While lenses like the 16-35 allow the photographer to become part of the action, the 85 gives you certain distance and isolation allowing you to capture totally different moments.

EF 85/1.2 illustration

 

EF 85/1.2 illustration

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Polarizer Filter Mini Test

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

B+W polarizers have great reputation and I always thought about them as the automatic selection for my lenses. However, I needed new slim  polarizer for my UWA lens and B+W did not work well for me this time, because the slim version was needed and slim B+W filters don’t have front thread, which I find annoying. I looked at competition and decided for Hoya HD. Now I have several brands of CPL filters, which is a great opportunity for some comparison testing.

The Contenders

The Test Objective

This is not attempting to be a scientific test and is not conducted in laboratory conditions. Tested filters have different sizes, have different age, everything is tested on a camera with 50/1.4 lens with larger filters fitted with an adapter ring. No lens hoods were used. Transparency/density test was repeated twice, other tests were run only once. Areas of interest were:

  • Density. How much light the different polarizers block
  • Tint. What kind of tint the filter have, if any
  • Strength of the the polarizing effect. Is weak polarizing effect the price for better transparency?
  • Look of the green and blue polarized areas. Do the filters create equally pleasing greens and blues?
  • Contrast. See how different filters impact contrast f no lens hood is used. Lens hood could not be used due to different sizes of filters used in the test

Testing And Results

Density

Density was evaluated by two methods:

  1. With filters placed on a transparency light table, every filter placed at the same location of the table to eliminate unevenness. Power voltage fluctuation was around 0.5% during the test. The filter was shot with a macro lens with camera in manual setting. The images were brought to Photoshop and color balance was set to 5400k, which is the “paper” color temperature of the light table. Center of each filter image was then cut in Photoshop and placed in a composite image for visual comparison
  2. Diffuse white wall was photographed with the filters on. Each filter was turned to make sure there is no influence of the polarizing angle. Two different walls were used and exposure readouts collected and deltas between no filter and filter on averaged.
Outcome of the first method. Comparison of filter density/transmittance. Four identical manual  exposures of 4 different filters on a light table. White balanced to the color temperature of the light table.

Polarizers, tint and density

Outcome of the second method. Number of f-stops needed to achieve correct exposure  compared to lens with no filter.
Filter Stops (approx.)
No filter 0
Hoya HD 1
B+W Kaesemann 1 1 3/4
B+W Kaesemann 2 1 3/4
Soligor 1 1/2

 

Transmittance calculated from method 2.

Polarizers, transmittance

Tint

The outcome of the Transparency 1 test served as an evaluation target for tint. The following image is the same as above, but with increased saturation to show the color of the shift.

 

Polarizers test, tint

Strength Of The Polarizing Effect

Strength of the polarizing effect was evaluated from pictures of a plant with waxy leaves. The pictures show no significant difference between the images. 

Color of Polarized Sky And Foliage
Sky

This is a crop from the darkest corner taken with different filters. Camera exposure was set to auto, no individual corrections were made on the raws – all processed the same way.

The strength of all filters looks very similar. The yellowish tint of Hoya is clearly visible in the sky  (and clouds).

Green Foliage

This is another crop from the same field, showing green foliage. The same processing conditions as above.

The yellow tint does not seem to bother here.

The following composite shows the whole picture from which the above crops were taken. The white balance is equalized, this time.

polarizers-color 

Contrast

Contrast was evaluated on pictures taken without lens hood. The differences are subtle, Hoya HD seems to give the same or better contrast as the Kaesemanns, the Soligor shows discernibly lower contrast than the others. The Soligor has apparently  no coating and therefore this behavior is not a surprise.

Conclusion

The above mini test shows behavior of three different brands of filters and sample variation between two B+W polarizers. Let’s sumarize the major findings:

  • The Soligor that has no coating shows discernibly lower contrast when used without lens hood. On the other hand, the other qualities are similar to much more expensive filters
  • The B+W Kaesemann shows some sample variation, more than I would expect with premium filter. The polarizing effect and resulting color is about the same as the other filters
  • The Hoya HD passes 3/4 EV more light than the B+W, which is nice. It is very thin, but still has a front thread, which is very nice. The polarizing effect and contrast seem to be on par or perhaps better than the B+W. The yellowish tint may require one extra step in post processing

The test does not say anything about sharpness, flare, quality of the mount, ease of maintenance or durability. Without these parameters I’ll avoid rating these filters. 

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