Digital Diversity

Its been just over 3 weeks now since the best day of my life. The woman I love became my wife. The day went perfectly and it will always be remembered but that’s not what this article is about. Its about where we went afterwards – Kuredu Island in the Maldives for our honeymoon.

1 week after I became a married man, my wife and I set off to the airport for a trip to what can only be described as paradise.  It took a fairly uncomfortable 9 hour no thrills flight to get there that was made bearable by 3 things. The thought of where we were going to, the bottle of sparkling wine we purchased and a very friendly and chatty man named Jeff.

Once landed we headed to the plane exit and were greeted by a wall of heat. This was quite a shock to the system due to the cold weather of the UK and seeing as I was still wearing jeans and trainers I wasn’t helping the situation.

The last leg of the journey was to take a sea plane to the Island itself. This was delayed by an hour which was a bit irritating due to how long we had already been travelling but we weren’t going to let it dampen our spirits.

Finally our sea plane was ready and we got on board. The planes them selves are fairly small and hold about 15-20 people. The best part about them is that they give you some great views of the atolls from the sky while you fly to your island.

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I have been interested in having one of my pictures printed to canvas for a while. While I normally prefer regular prints of photo’s sometimes canvas can look really great. When I was approached by MCanvasPrints.co.uk to review their services I took the opportunity to finally get one made for myself.

They have a fair few sizes to choose from but I decided to go with a 12 x 18 portrait size. Along with size you also have a choice of wrap to choose from. This is what happens around the edges of the canvas. Many you see in the shops are bled over the edge. This means that if you look straight on at the image you don’t see what ever has been printed around the sides and loose part of the image. MCanvasPrints offer 4 options which help you get the result you want. You can go with the standard bleed technique I just described but if you don’t want to loose any of the image to the frame then you can choose one of the other three options.  You can use what they call mirror wrap. This means the edges simply reflect the image down the sides so that the whole image is fitted on the front. The other 2 options are to simply have either a white or black wrap around the frame.

I decided to go with the mirror wrap because this means I keep the whole image visible when looking head on and still have the traditional canvas look with the image wrapping around the frame.

That canvas took about 1 week to arrive which is fairly reasonable I feel. When it arrived is was very well protected with some high quality bubble wrap inside the cardboard box.

I was pleased with the quality of the print. The colours were accurate to the picture I sent them and the image was crisp and clean.

Here you can see the mirror wrap. As soon as the image reaches the edge of the picture it reflects around the edges.

You can see from this shot that the frame isn’t as thick as some of these ones you see in the shops. Personally I like this as some of the ones I have seen elsewhere can be a little chunky. I’m not sure how thick the extra large canvas prints they do are, but I’m sure they would be happy to tell you if you contact them.

Overall I am very pleased with the finished image and would happily recommend them. They aren’t the cheapest out there but you tend to get what you pay for.

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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