Digital Diversity

I wrote an article a while back about the starter lenses for your DSLR. This was to help you work out what you want to get in the future and also give you a nice range of focal lengths to work with. In that article I mentioned I wanted an ultra wide angle lens for its very wide field of view and the way it distorts perspective.

Ultra wide on a crop sensor like the 500D (1.6x) is about 10-12 mm. This equates to the same field of view as 16-19.2. There are several options of lenses you can choose from. For my Canon 500D these were a few of my options.

• Canon 10-22
• Sigma 10-20
• Tokina 11-16
• Tamron 11-18

I wanted a lens that went as wide as possible so for me that ruled out the Tokina and the Tameron. This left it between the Canon and the Sigma. I read a lot of reviews and the two lenses are fairly equal. Image quality wise, the Canon tended to just about win but when I looked at the price the Canon was £200 more expensive. The image quality difference was small enough that you cant really see the difference without pixel peeping so that really wasn’t a factor. Both were very well built lenses as well. I also really like the finish on the Sigma EX lenses. Seeing as the lenses were fairly equal overall, the price was the deciding factor for me so I went online and ordered the Sigma 10-20 F4-5.6 HSM EX DC.
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Since the day I started reading up about DSLR’s I kept hearing about battery grips. I wasn’t sure what the were at the time or even what they looked like. After a bit of research I found out they were a grip that slotted into your battery compartment. The extra grip is added to the bottom of the camera making it a similar shape to that of the Canon 1D series only smaller. I sort of shrugged off the idea of getting one when I first got my camera thinking of it as a bit of a gimmick to make your camera look more ‘pro’.

As I carried on my adventures of learning photography online (being glued to flickr) the subject of battery grips kept creeping in to conversations. Maybe there was more to them than I had realised. Surprise surprise there was. A battery grip allows you the following:

• Extra grip at the bottom of the camera
• Second set of buttons on this grip
• Can hold 2 batteries rather than 1
• Second battery cartridge for using AA’s if needed

I decided I must have one.
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Learning how to expose photos in anything but automating modes can start to get confusing. When I got my first digital camera (Ixus 75) I didn’t know much about cameras in general, let alone metering modes and correct exposure.

When I upgraded to a superzoom (panasonic fz28) I switched to aperture priority mode. My main reason for this was that I could choose the aperture and change the ISO and exposure compensation to alter my shutter speed. This served me well and a lot of people use this method. I pretty much stayed clear of manual mode as it just sounded to fiddly to be of any use.

Since I got my DSLR (Canon 500D) I have started to think about this more. The only problem I would get with aperture priority was inconsistent exposure. What I mean by this is that say I was photographing my dog. As he runs passed different colour backgrounds this will in turn effect the exposure settings and lead to an over / underexposed shot. This would in turn have effected the shutter speed and can cause unwanted blur. I would also have to use exposure compensation and sometimes I may forget to change it back which would ruin the next shot. Another problem I had was that the exposure lock button never seems to lock the exposure for very long and getting the exposure back to what is was can be a pain.

To escape these problems I needed to step into the realm of manual mode.

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