Digital Diversity

Canons 70-200 range are fairly well known for their high quality and being some of the best zoom lenses you can buy from Canons range. There are (at the time of writing) 5 versions of this lens available. 2 versions at F4 and 3 versions at f2.8:
Canon 70-200 F4
Canon 70-200 F4 IS
Canon 70-200 F2.8
Canon 70-200 F2.8 IS
Canon 70-200 F2.8 IS mkII

After using the canon 55-250 IS for some time I found it a great set of focal lengths for shooting nature and wildlife that I can get relatively close to. For this reason I have had my eye on getting one of the 70-200′s as a replacement. The problem with these lenses is price. They aren’t cheap. The most reasonably priced one by far is the Canon 70-200 f4 without IS (image stabilization). To get the version with IS costs almost double the price and that is something I cant afford to do at this point in my life. So this clearly led me to purchase the non IS version.

Canon 70-200 F4 L, size - 76x172mm, weight - 705g

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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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In this third instalment of my Portrait re-touching Photoshop tutorials I will be talking about altering the hair. Hair is a big part of some ones over all look and simply changing the colour can give big impact to your photographs.

This tutorial will cover 2 areas. The first is removing stray hairs from around the head and face. The second is changing the colour.

For this tutorial I recommend you have an understanding of the following. Each subject is linked to the appropriate Photoshop tutorial
• Layers and Masks
• Adjustment layers
• Hue / Saturation adjustment layers
• Cloning and healing

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