A Few From The New Lens

[slaughteredlamb]

Well yesterday I bought myself the Sigma 10-20 lens and today I took it down to Worthing seafront to see what it could do.










First impressions:
Wow it is wide, seriously wide. So wide in fact that I was able to capture nearly an entire street of houses simply by standing on the other side of the road.
It's sharp, very sharp. It's not quite as sharp as my 70-200 f/2.8 L but not much is and it isn't that far off.
It's got a good minimum focusing distance. The 'trouble' with super wide angle lenses like this is that they can make your subject look miles away. However as this lens has a very wide field of view and a close focusing distance it means that you can get creative and get right up close to your subject and still fit it all in. The trade off with doing this is loads of barrel distortion but that's the point of super wide angles.

I'm very impressed with this lens and can see bags of potential uses for it, I've already got a dozen locations in mind for future shots.

[rutty]

Man, the clarity in these shots 

You're clearly making better use of this lens than I am. Lovely stuff

[sickpuppy]

Very nice. Where did you get the lens from?

[slaughteredlamb]

I'm utterly ashamed to say I got the lens from Jessops! This goes against everything I hold dear, I hate Jessops with a vengence it's just that I really wanted the lens, didn't want to get it from Hong Kong and Jessops price was only £20 more expensive than the best online UK price I could get and it was there, right then, calling to me.

[Chris H]

All I can say is crikey!

They is good.

[MattC]

 

[slaughteredlamb]

Man, the clarity in these shots 

You're clearly making better use of this lens than I am. Lovely stuff

What problems are you finding with the lens?

[rutty]

Man, the clarity in these shots 

You're clearly making better use of this lens than I am. Lovely stuff

What problems are you finding with the lens?

Problems? My only problem is that I'm a lazy photographer. I'm familiar with the basics but I don't want to be waiting around for the right light - clearly you've had some superb lighting conditions with these shots.

I've tended to use mine during drab, overcast days and not really bothered to get up early to catch sunrises or waited around for that golden hour in the evening.

I just need to get the tripod out in some half-decent weather and take some shots of interesting subjects - like you have here.

[slaughteredlamb]

Ahh yes, I know that feeling all too well. Actually all of these photos were taken at the worst possible time of day, between 12am and 1pm, I really wanted to go there for sunset but I couldn't pursuade the wife.

Here's a tip:
Whether you shoot in RAW or Jpeg and are shooting outdoors set your white balance to Cloudy (obviously if you shoot RAW you can change this anyway but it just speeds things up). Why? Well if it's a bright sunny day, like it was for me yesterday, shooting with the white balance set to cloudy gives a warm hue to the tones. If the day is cloudy, then you've set the correct colour balance anyway.

The only time I take my camera off cloudy is if I'm shooting indoors under artificial lights or using flash as my main light source.

[Mr Anderson]

Some excellent shots, the first is very vibrant but I particularly like the last one - it has a lot of character in it. Besides your cloudy WB tip, which I tend to do unless there's a lot of brown shades around (seems to make the unnatural looking), what else do you suggest? Have you done much to the saturation in PP?

[slaughteredlamb]

In Aperture I tend to:

Adjust exposure whilst keeping an eye on the histogram
Increase contrast slightly (In Photoshop this would be a S curve in the Curves window)
Boost saturation slightly, litterally just one incremement (In photoshop this would be increasing it too 1 or 2 on the saturation scale
Increase definition by around 5 - 10% (Very much depends on the photo sometimes I leave it alone)
Set levels. This usually is just moving the black and white points to the edge of the histogram but sometimes I'll go further than that depending on the effect I'm after
Highlight recovery/lowlight recovery only if it's needed and only by 5% at most.
Sharpening

I have also written an article on an introduction to photo editing which is on the DDN front end! (there is a formatting/CSS problem with this article at the moment which I'm trying to resolve which is why text is right up against the images but it's still readable)

[rutty]

Thanks for the tips!

Unfortunately I don't have Aperture (can't really justify the expense at the moment) but I'm using iPhoto for most adjustments. I'm shooting in RAW and I remember your instructions to shoot with cloudy white balance, so I tend to leave that on anyway.

I do sharpen a little bit and adjust saturation and contrast within iPhoto, plus moving the levels sliders to suit the image. I'm also aware that shooting with the sun behind much improves the final result. I'm trying hard to remember to check my histograms too and using exposure compensation when I need to.

To be honest, I've not really been trying particularly hard to take any decent images for the last six months, although I've lucked in with my 50mm lens a few times! The 10-20, though, needs a bit more love to get the best out of it I think.

As always it's great to see some great work by others to inspire me to do better. There have been some great examples on here

[samhs]

love the buoys. Shame about the distracting bg in the lobster pots (top left) and fishing boat (left) shots - nicely processed all round though - slight inner glow/shadow after the stroked border? Looks really good. The money shot is the buoys though. What does one of these lenses sting me?

[MattC]

love the buoys.

I heard youd bought a mac 

[samhs]

I've got three. Now bend over while I bitch-slap you.

[slaughteredlamb]

Cheers Sam. The cheapest price in the UK I've found is for £284 from Amazon but if you are prepared to buy from Hong Kong you could get it for about £250 delivered

[Britman]

It's a brilliant little lens isn't it. I'm sad now because I haven't have any real chance to get with mine.
It certainly make you think about your composure.