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.

(more…)

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…)