Digital Diversity

If your new to the world of DSLR’s like my self you will more than likely have purchased a camera body with a kit lens.  The latest kit lens tends to be the 18-55mm IS lens. This is a nice little lens that gives you a wide to mid zoom range. A lot of people will find this lens is a good place to start as you can take nice landscapes, scenes, snaps and event shots with it. It probably wont take you long till you wonder about extra lenses and read one of the many many many websites / forums where this subject is discussed. It can be fairly daunting and often make you feel your current lens is sub par. This article is intended to simply show you the starter lenses I have chosen that wont break the bank and give you a great place to start. The idea is to have some nice starter lenses that will get you going, then later when you work out what you use most you can then decide whether you want to upgrade to a lens that fits your needs better. Many people read these forums and websites and just decide on a £900 lens without really knowing if its for them. Then down the line they have these expensive lenses sitting there not being used.

So what lenses do I use?

I currently have 3 lenses. None of them broke the bank and all of them are of a reasonable quality that will give me nice results as long as I use them right. These Lenses are:

• Canon 18 – 55 mm f/3.5-5.6 IS (came with camera)
• Canon 55-250 mm F4-5.6 IS (£166 of amazon)
• Canon 50 mm F1.8 (£80 of amazon)
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Having recently entered the world of making stock photography as a little side venture, I looked at what I would need to create the type of images I wanted to take. Having graphic design experience I knew that a lot of images I purchased for jobs fell into a few areas. These tended to be business men or women doing various things such as meetings, Life style shots and still life shots of various objects. I don’t do portraiture shots so that sort of ruled out the first 2 so this meant I would be concentrating on the 3rd. For this sort of photography I would need a Tri-pod, a sharp lens and a light box. I already had my Tri-pod and recently purchased the Canon 50mm f1.8 mk2 lens that can be incredibly sharp at the right settings (mainly f2.8 and higher). The one thing I didn’t have was a light box.

So what is a light box?

A light box is simply a box with reflective surfaces so you can bounce light around giving an even spread over your subject. You can also get light tents that do a similar thing. Seeing as Christmas is almost upon us, I have a mortgage to pay and a wedding coming in the new year, I find myself finding it hard to justify buying such an item. Instead I decided to put my Macgyver hat on and build one.

To make your own light box you will need the following.

• Cardboard box (or any box really)
• Kitchen foil
• White paper
• Sticky tape
• 2 flexible desk lamps (I got 2 for £6 each from Argos)
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One of the most common tasks in photo retouching is sharpening up the image (or at least parts of an image). No matter what camera you have (or what lens if you have a DSLR) the image will almost always come out a little soft. This Varies from camera to camera and if you have a DSLR you can get sharper results by buying higher quality lenses. Even so, images still tend to need at least a small amount of sharpening no matter what.

This tutorial will go through 3 different methods of sharpening your images. You just need to  find which one suits your needs the most. They all work just fine but have different methods and adaptability.

For this tutorial you will need to have an understanding of the following Photoshop techniques:
Layers and Masks

These 3 methods are:
• The UnSharp mask
• High Pass sharpen
• UnSharp mask plus lighten and darken blend modes split over 2 layers.
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