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.
(more…)

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.
(more…)

If you have read the very first post I made here at Digital Diversity you will know why I bought my Panasonic FZ28. I did it because I wanted more out of a camera than my little Canon Ixus 75 could give me. More zoom, more control and better quality images. Well its happened again. I hit that roof where my camera was slowing me down.

Dont get me wrong, the Panasonic FZ28 is a great super zoom bridge camera that can give you some great images but it does have its limits. For example, in low light it really did suffer, I couldn’t shoot in rapid burst while using RAW files, The dynamic range was a bit limited which led to easily blown highlights and so on

Because of this I started to look a bit more into DSLR’s. I was already aware of their advantages from an image quality point of view but I needed to learn more about lens quality, prices and what type of DSLR would sustain my needs.

(more…)