As I mentioned previously, I’m in Steamboat Springs this weekend. You may have noticed that I have a new masthead banner, with a photo from my trip. Here are some more pictures:
I particularly like that last one — an armed armadillo inside a tourist kitsch shop in downtown Steamboat. Heh.
Lastly, here’s a vertical panoramic shot (made by stitching three photos together with Calico) of the beautiful waterfall a few miles east of town, Fish Creek Falls:
I’ve always been a big fan of your photos, Brendan, dating back to the Irish Trojan blog. I see from your EXIF data that you use a Rebel XTi, but if you don’t mind me asking, what does your lens collection consist of?
Thanks, tristar! My lens collection consists of… the standard lens that comes with the XTi. 🙂 It’s a nice lens, though!
I do also have a fisheye attachment that I use occasionally, for shots like this and this, but it’s not an actual, full-fledged lens per se, and anyway it isn’t in evidence here.
I desperately want a telephoto lens and a super wide angle lens, but I haven’t been able to afford them yet. So all of these photos were taken with just the standard lens. Well, all except the first one, which, like the current masthead photo, was actually taken with my PowerShot.
Brendan, if you are looking for telephoto and wide angle consider going for used prime lenses. They should be available at your local camera shop. Going for one focal length means a better quality of lens at a lower price. (The optics that go into zoom lenses are expensive and complicated and at telephoto sizes are really big and unless they are really good they degrade photo quality, and if they are good they can cost a lot, as you mentioned).
I’m not sure exactly what Canon makes because Nikon rocks Canon’s socks, but I’d look for something between 20 and 30mm for the wide angle and something around 200 or 250mm for the telephoto. Both should be doable for not too much money. Especially used, just never buy used lenses from a pro photographer always buy used camera equipment from doctors. Actually anything that you want to buy used and you want the owner to have barley used it and taken exceptionally good care of it buy from a doctor. Except for medical equipment and golf clubs, obviously though the clubs are probably still pretty good. (On the same point, never ever under any circumstances should you purchase used bike equipment from a pro if you intend to actually ride said equipment.)
Hats off to you, Brendan. The fact that you shoot those with the 18-55 mm kit lens is nothing short of amazing. I noticed you use picnik.com to edit…I’m going to have to check that out.
dcl is correct. You can get a lot more lens with a prime. Take for example, Loyette/Loyacita pictures: the 50mm f/1.4 can’t be beat (well, it can, for three times the price, but I digress…). You can pick one up for about $300, and it’s perfect with the wide aperature for low-light indoor photograph situations.
Seeing that you shoot a lot outdoors, go for something with a relatively high aperature for your nature shots. You don’t need a narrow depth of field, and aperature really drives the cost up. You could definitely get by with an f/4 vs. an f/2.8 or something like that, since your available light will be sufficient.
I use this page quite a bit for my Canon lens drooling/fantasizing:
http://www.the-digital-picture.com
I personally don’t bother with used lenses. They can be questionable no matter who you buy them from, and the way lenses hold their value, you usually don’t get good enough of a deal to justify the risk.
Thanks, tristar!
As for picnik… that’s just Flickr’s native editor, and I usually use it for simple things like cropping or brightening up an image slightly, when I forget to do so beforehand in iPhoto. I really do very little post-processing, though. The most sophisticated I get is playing around with the various iPhoto settings trying to get an underexposed photo to be acceptably bright.
Thanks for the lens suggestions, too. 🙂
P.S. I forgot straightening — that’s the other type of post-processing I do fairly routinely. For instance, the above photo of the Yampa River was taken with the camera sitting at an odd angle on a rock (so that I could do the one-second exposure with a very narrow aperature, to make the water have that “flowing” look). I had to rotate the image substantially, probably on the order of 20 or 25 degrees, to make it straight, because of the angle of the rock. (I considered just leaving it crooked, but it looked just as good straightened, so I straightened it.) More frequently, I’ll have to rotate by just a handful of degrees when I’m careless in taking a picture that includes the horizon line. So I do that all the time. But I don’t even own Photoshop, and don’t get into the sophisticated post-processing stuff… I don’t know how, honestly. 🙂