Two days with the Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5 EX DC HSM super wide angle zoom lens

Test subject one: My son playing Club Penguin. He is not sad, just focused on the game, and a little bit annoyed with me removing framed photos from the wall, clearing off the table, and moving the computer to get just the right angle. The wide angle lens distorts perspective, creating the illusion of an enormous computer and a rather small boy.

 I bought a Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5 lens recently, and decided to spend a a couple of days getting acquainted with it. It turned put to be quite an adventure. I learned quite a bit. The very first thing I learned:

Do not wear a hat while shooting with a super wide angle lens!

If you wear a hat while taking a shot like this, your hat will fall off.

Working with a 10mm lens is a lot different from working with a 30mm or longer lens. With a longer lens, you usually want straight lines to be straight. With a super wide angle, the whole point is to have a lens that can distort perspective. To do this, you will need to tilt the camera up or down while shooting. If you tilt the camera up, for example while shooting a tall building, your hat will fall off!

Extreme angles – high or low, and strong leading lines are important when using a super wide angle lens.

The first day I did not really have time to do much testing. Work and playing with my son had priority.

The day after, I decided to take a long photo walk, and put the lens to the test.

High angle, with a slight downwards tilt – you can make even dull, ordinary things look interesting by distorting the perspective. I got the shot by putting the camera on a monopod and raising it as high as I could.

My first stop was at the Gardening Association in Gothenburg. No flowers to shoot there this time of year, but there are other things, like this lift.

When I bought the lens, I also bought an important accessory: A monopod!

Why on Earth would I want a monopod for a wide angle lens? Aren't monopods for tele lenses? Well, yes, but I did not buy the monopod to reduce camera shake. I bought it to extend my reach, so I can shoot from interesting angles.

I shot the lift by putting the camera on the monopod, so I could lift the camera high in the air. My Canon 60D has an LCD screen that can be angled, so I see what the camera is pointing at, even when it is two meters above my head. (I bought the 60D because the LCD screen makes it eminently useful for trick shots of various kinds.)

I used the self-timer on the camera, and focused manually. Autofocus does not work well when the camera is wobbling on a long pole.

Here is a thoroughly conventional wide angle shot.

 There is a spot in the park where you can see two buildings with reflections in the water, if the day is calm. Well, I was lucky. It wasn't windy, and thanks to the wide angle lens, I could get both buildings and the reflections in a single shot.

This is a thoroughly conventional shot, but there are still some things to take note of. In particular, take care with the edges of your shot. There are trees in the park, and some of them have rather long branches. I had to compose the shot carefully to avoid branches poking in at the edges.

When I had left the park I saw some divers in the canal. It turned out to be the Gårda Fire Department that was out practicing.

With a 10-20mm lens you need to get close, so I simply asked if it was ok to shoot while they were practicing. It was. I got some nice shots.

I made a mistake though. I should have lain down flat on the ground and shot slightly upwards, to get a more interesting angle for the shot of the diver.

Well, the next time I shoot a diver, I know what to do.

I met an interesting character while visiting the Science-Fiction Bookstore.

In this shot, you can see the difference it makes when you shoot from a low angle and tilt the camera up.

In Sweden, there is a yearly book sale that is quite an event. Lots of people who don't normally read books rush out and buy them, in order to not read them.

I usually do not participate in the frenzy, because I am stocked with books that I do read all year round. However, you can sometimes find a gem or two at the sale, so I sometimes do visit a bookstore or two.

I got the alien shot at the Science-Fiction Bookstore. My favorite bookstore in Gothenburg.

I went to Domkyrkan, the largest church in Gothenburg, to take panorama shots. The plan fell through because of the church is undergoing quite extensive restauration.

I settled for a less exiting shot of a candle, and decided to save the panorama shots for another day, and another blog post.

My son was happy to see me when I turned up at his school.

A basic rule of child photography says never, ever, shoot downwards! In most cases, it's a good rule. If you shoot downwards, you will shoot at the same angle you normally see children, and you will get boring shots.

However, with a wide angle lens, you can break the rule with good results. The perspective distortion lends interest to the shot. Even more important, if you can catch a great expression like the one my son has in this shot, you can get away with almost anything.

If you want to go a bit artsy, and focus on form, a wide angle lens is great. The most difficult part was keeping my own feet out of the picture. I used a filter built into my camera to turn the photo black and white.

The public library in Partille

One more example of going high and tilting down to distort lines and lending visual interest to a photo.

In the evening, I went to a meeting with the Lerum photography club. I took this shot on my way to the train. The lens makes the bridge look a lot longer than it really is.

When I got to the meeting, I took a shot of the building before going in. I placed the camera at ground level, and tilted it a bit. 

The 10-20mm range is more versatile than you might think. At 10mm I can cover most of a large room in a single shot. At 20mm I can get a fairly close shot without standing nose-to-nose with my subject.

The shots from the meeting are interesting only if you were at the meeting, so I'll be brief. After two days of thoroughly enjoyable testing, I am quite smitten with the lens. I like it a lot, and I know I can get great shots with it.

You might be interested to know that I lit the photos in the collage with a single Nissin Di866 Mk II flash. Thanks to the white walls, that was all the light that was needed.

Sigma has two 10-20mm lenses. The one I bought is the f/3.5 version, which is slightly more expensive than the other f/4-f/5.6 variable aperture version. In my opinion, getting the f/3.5 lens is worth it. I know I will be shooting indoors in less than ideal lighting conditions, so I need that extra bit of light sensitivity.

After two days, I have just begun to put the lens through its paces, so I have more fun testing to do in the near future.

Six things you should not post in photo groups

I am a member of a photography group that recently banned all photos of dogs, ducks, hamsters, geese, and a couple of other animals. The reason was not a sudden hostility towards pets per sé, but the group had been flooded by bad animal photos. 

The group admin had, several times, tried to encourage members to think before posting, and only post their very best photos. It did not work. The people who posted really bad photos seemed unable to distinguish between high quality and cr*p. This phenomenon is fairly common, its most extreme form is called The Anosognosic's Dilemma. (An anosognosic is a person who, due to a lack of self awareness, is completely unable to judge her own level of competence. We all suffer from milder forms of agnosognosia. The effects can become very visible in photography groups.)

While most of us are not full blown anosognosics, I think most of us photography enthusiasts have slipped and posted shots we should not have.

Sometimes, it is because the shot is bad, sometimes it is best to refrain from posting even a good shot, because the subject matter has been done to death.

Here are six things you should think at least three times about before posting. It also happens to be six photographic sins I myself have committed:

Pets

Think twice, or thrice, before posting even a good shot of a dog. You may like it, the pet owner will love it, but to most other people it simply is not interesting. 

Dogs, cats, rabbits, horses, etc., are cute, and that is the reason why photos of them have been done to death. The downside is that interesting pet photos are almost as rare as hair on an egg.

A photo of a dog may be very appealing to the dog owner, people who know the dog, and to the photographer. I like the photo above. The dog was very nice and friendly, I like the soulful expression, and the composition.

Still, it is a very common kind of photo. While I would not hesitate to post it in the Dogs group on Google+, I would not post it in a high quality photography group, simply because it is not original enough. (Well, I actually did, but I have grown wiser since then. Maybe...)

I like animals, and my new web site (, which is'nt quite ready for publication yet,) even has a pet section. I do photograph pets and other animals commercially, and for fun. However, that does not make it a good idea to post my animal photos in photography groups. Neither do I post them on 1x.com, the photo site where I post my favorite shots.

You might wonder what an original pet photo might look like. Well, you'd have to capture an animal doing something unusual, or an animal having an unusual feature.

A dog with sectoral heterochromia makes an interesting subject. Though the condition isn't all that unusual in dogs, it does bring interest to the shot.

If you want more examples of pet shots that are interesting, I have set up a small collection of photos on a Pinterest board. The photos are from 1x.com. Go there and search for your favorite animal if you want more.

Sunsets

Like so many others, I have watched a great sunset, and caught in the mood, brought out my camera and clicked away. The problem is that though the sunset looks great in real life, it is just not that interesting when caught in a photo.

A nice sunset can make a fantastic background for a great photo, but a sunset on its own is too common to be interesting. The story in a sunset photo is "the sun sets, again". That is an old story. You have to add something else to make it worth looking at.

One of the simplest things you can do ist to shoot a silhouette in a sunset scene. In the photo above, I went one small step further, and used the reflection of the sunset in the water as the backdrop for the photo.

Landscapes

Lots of people will start nitpicking on the technical issues, like very poor composition, and blown out highlights, and miss the main problem: It is a boring photograph. There is no interesting story in it.

Well, what can I say? Even worse than the awful, walk-up-shot composition of this picture, is the fact that there is nothing interesting there. Horses are nice, but these ones are not doing anything interesting.

This is a horrible shot from a technical point of view, with the horse's ass at the left edge, the blown out clouds, and the horizon in the middle of the photograph.

Where lots of people get it wrong, is that they start picking up on such details, and discuss how to correct them, when the real problem is that the scene is boring.

I remember the day I took this shot, and it was a great day. I visited a farm with my son and my mother, and we had great fun. I was also, at the time, completely unfettered by good taste in photography, and had no skill whatsoever.

I have kept the photo to remind me of that great day, but, except in an article such as this, it should not be inflicted on people who have done me no harm. They deserve better.

Family

A cringeworthy photo can be great fun for you and your family, but everyone else will just...cringe.

I love my family photos. My family also loves family photos. Only a couple of days ago, my ex-wife (who is a close friend) and I sat down, collected the best photos of our son from last year, and made a photo calendar. Don't worry, the photo above was not included!

My son and I had a lot of fun when we took the shot above, using the camera in my laptop. I love the photo because of the feeling and the memory, but the photo in itself is not good.

Flowers

Don't do this! Just don't. Oh the photographic sins I have committed. Perhaps the worst thing is that when I took this photo, I decided to keep it. The reason I keep it now, is that I want to keep a record showing my progress from truly awful to...well, at least not this awful.

Flowers are great for practicing photography. They never refuse to have their picture taken. They don't walk away while you fiddle with camera settings, though they may wilt a bit if you take very long. And, flowers are beautiful.

So, taking a lot of flower photos is a good idea, it is great practice. Just don't post them...

Of course there are flower shots worth posting, but they are fairly rare, and they often require a bit of preparation.

Photos of beautiful flowers are so common that the beauty itself is not enough to warrant publishing a shot. Make your flower photo tell a story! Then you have something to publish.

To take the shot of the rose, I first dried the rose, I bought theatre blood, and set up the scene on my living room table. I put a white paper on the table, and carefully overexposed the shot. In post, I blew out the background completely, desaturated my hand, darkened the blood, did some work on the rose, and presto: A picture that tells a story about love, roses, and death.

Food

Judging from photos I see on Facebook and Google+, it seems lots of people believe I am interested in what they are eating.

Believe me when I say, I am not! I do not even want to know what my close friends are eating. I am interested in food photography, but that is something completely different.

I have seen bad, completely unappealing food photos, even from very good photographers. It seems like there is no taste involved when people shoot their food.

If you want to shoot food, check out the food photos of Herminia Dosal first. If what you are eating does not look as good, by all means, shoot it for practice, but don't publish.

Shoot food that looks good. Be prepared to do a lot of post processing. With this photo, I increased saturation, removed pieces of leaves, and lots of crumbs on the black cloth.

If you decide to publish a food photo anyway, remember that it is not about what tastes good, but about what looks good!

This article was partially inspired by Are you still hunting for the shot, a blog post by Scott Kelby. Not all, but many, of the bad photos I see, and the ones I have taken myself, are "hunting for the shot" photos.

All photographers, even the best ones in the world, take bad photos. The great photographers do it much less often, but they still do. You rarely see those bad photos, because good photographers are very careful in selecting the photos they will show.

Most of us can improve our published photos a lot, just by being a bit more selective.

Now, I'm off to take much better shots than the ones in this article. I hope you will do likewise.

Color correcting wedding clothes - or perhaps not

This is what the original photo looks like without color correction. I prefer this version, but I am probably the only one on the planet that does.

I like to prepare, and an excellent way to prepare for wedding shoots is to go to wedding conventions. It is also a great way to make new contacts, and perhaps land a job or two.

At a convention, you have no control over the light. That is pretty ok, because it leaves me free to focus on the moments that matter. In that respect, wedding photography (, wedding convention photography really, but the same idea applies), is like street photography: It is about capturing the moments that matter.

Then again, when you get back home and look through the photos, the little matter of color correction crops up.

The main lighting at the convention was quite yellow in color. The background lights where mostly green. This created an underwater feeling to the show. Not in a bad way. I liked it. A bit like a wedding in the halls of Poseidon.

The Poseidon statue outside the convention hall at Götaplatsen in Gothenburg. It may, or may not, have inspired the lighting scheme inside.

And yes, there is a very large Poseidon statue right outside the convention hall. I don't know if the lighting was designed to play on that, or not, but it did, and it worked. At least for me.

The lighting made the white clothes look quite yellowish, but it made the people look good. If I color correct and make the gowns white, the models will also look quite pale.

Now, if I color correct an entire photo in one go, I might get something like this (Click on the photo if you want a larger version):

Left: Uncorrected; Center: Quick white balance correction; Right: Levels adjustment

The leftmost photo is uncorrected, it's there just so you can compare the different versions side-by-side.

If you feel the need to color correct, which may be because you feel the need to have a happy client, or just to get paid, you have several options:

One option is to just change the white balance. In Aperture, you select Natural Gray in the White Balance adjustment, and click something that should be white or gray in the photo. A wedding dress is usually the right color, if you are shooting a wedding in Western Europe or the USA.

Take care to click an area that is not fully white. If you click a completely white area, the software algorithm won't know if the area is white because it was white in reality, or because it is overexposed.  results may be more interesting than you want.

Another option is to use a Levels correction on the red, green and blue color channels separately. That provides a bit more control. That is what I did in the rightmost of the three versions above.

But wait, there is more: So far we have corrected the entire photo in one go. What if we want to treat some parts, let's say the clothes, different from the skin?

The wedding gown, the jacket, and the rest of the image have been treated separately.

I could bring the photo over to Pixelmator and separate parts of the photo into different layers. However, in this case, it was easier to continue working in Aperture.

I chose a saturation brush and used it to paint the wedding gown. Then, I created a separate Saturation adjustment, and painted the jacket. This allowed me to make her white dress just a tad more white than his white jacket.

However, the people who arranged the show went through a lot of trouble to put up green lights in the background, and warm yellow lights in the foreground, so the dresses looked anything but white during the show.

For a client, I would offer both color corrected and original versions, but since this blog is mostly about what I like, I have gone for the warmer colors. I like the underwater feeling. It's probably just because I know about the Poseidon statue outside, but still...

Here are some more photos from the show. No color correction, just the way it looked when I was there:

This photo is so green you almost get an underwater feeling. Imagine marrying in an underwater dome at a coral reef. Above your heads sharks are swimming, smaller fish are looking in... 

It's been one of those days...

This morning I had no idea I would end up in a strait jacket before the day was over. Don't worry! It is just a test for an upcoming shoot.

Trying to put on a strait jacket by oneself is very, very difficult. Just as well I did not succeed, or managing the camera would have been well nigh impossible.

Given how difficult it is to get out of a strait jacket, I probably could not have written this blog post either. (Well, not really. The jacket is fake, the cloth is thin enough to rip to pieces if need be.)

Lighting the scene was very easy. I aimed one flash into the ceiling to create ambience, put a speed grid on a second flash, and aimed it at a point on the wall where I guessed my head would be.

You learn a lot from running tests like this, so it is not as crazy as it looks.

Backlight your headshots by shooting a flash through the backdrop

Along with the umbrellas, lightstands, and other whatnots, I am always carrying a bed sheet in my portable studio bag. I have written two articles on how to use the bed sheet to create a backlit silhouette, and how to use it in combination with a front light to create a film noir type high contrast image.

The bed sheet setup is the same as in the other two articles. As before, I ensure that the light hitting the bed sheet is spread very evenly by first shooting it through an umbrella.

The key light is also a shoot through umbrella. If you imagine the subject standing in the middle of a clock face and the camera being at 6 o'clock, the umbrella will be at 7:30. It is a bit higher than my head, and angled down.

I used an 85 mm lens, and had the camera mounted quite high. I shot at 1/80s, f/8.

A good headshot is about more than placing the lights and setting the camera. Shooting someone with glasses can be tricky. You want the subject to angle his head so that wrinkles on the neck are minimized.

Peter Hurley recommends doing that by "putting the forehead forwards", which is what I did in the shot above. When you do that, you have to take care so that the frames of the glasses don't cover the eyes. As you can see, I'm cutting it close in the shot above.

If you put the subject very close to the bed sheet, or large softbox if you prefer to use more expensive gear, you will get a wrap-around effect from the light. Photons move in straight lines of course, but some of them will move from the edge of the bed sheet at an angle such that they hit the side of the head and the upper part of the front side of the shoulders.

To help light the face evenly, I use two reflectors. The first reflector is a triangular silver reflector held at chest level, just out of frame. The second reflector is the white door on the subject's left side.

You work with what you have got. If there hadn't been a door there, I could have used a large piece of white paper, or a third flash on a low power setting.

The same subject, bed sheet and doorway as in the headshot. Everything else is different though.

I am continuously amazed by how you can deliberately create entirely diferent photos, and tell different stories, by changing the light, shooting angle, lens, posture and clothing.

As a photographer, I want to do it all. While you can certainly become very good at something if you specialize, you need to do a lot of different things if you want to be truly creative.

Now, it's time to shoot again.

Film Noir: Lighting Eyes With a Pizza Box Gobo

A Film Noir style shot, backlit through a bed sheet, and lit from the front by shaping flash light with a pizza box. Very much in the spirit of a low budget noir style movie.

In a previous post I showed how to create a backlit Film Noir style photo using a bed sheet hung in a doorframe as a large softbox. That worked, but the resulting photo was a silhouette. A bit dark even for a noir style photo.

Lighting the eyes a bit would make the photo come alive. How do you do that with a hotshoe flash without also lighting the entire room, and destroying the deep shadows?

You need a thin sliver of light, aimed at the eyes. Since I did this in the middle of the night, I could not go to the photo store and buy an expensive light modifier. I had to get creative, and find something that could shape light the way I wanted.

A pizza box and some gaffer tape made an excellent light shaper.

A pizza box had the right size and shape, so I brought out the gaffer tape and used it to mount the pizza box on a flash. I put the flash, with a radio trigger, on a lightstand, and was ready to go.

The pizza box gobo in action. I added an extra piece of gaffer tape on the right side to eliminate some light that was hitting the wall instead of my eyes.

It took a couple of tries, but when I had adjusted the height of the lightstand, it was pretty easy to hit my eyes with the flash. I started with the flash on 1/64 of full power, and turned it up little by little.

Easy to do, took a couple of minutes, but it made a lot of difference to the photo. Check out the original silhouette version, and you will understand what I mean.

Film Noir: Creating a silhouette with a bed sheet in a doorway

A bed sheet in a doorway makes a great softbox.

I held a flash photo tutorial at the Lerum Photo Club earlier this evening. We had a wonderful evening shooting a live model, gorillas(!), and dinosaurs(!!!).

I was asked to model too, not because of my looks, but because of my hat. I did not have time to shoot anything myself during the workshop, so when I came home, I decided to do a noir style shot before going to bed.

A bed sheet made an excellent diffuser. The softbox is the hallway.

The setup for the shot was very simple:

I used gaffer tape to fasten a bedsheet in my kitchen doorway. I put a flash and a white shoot through umbrella in the hallway. The idea was to get two layers of diffusion, first when the light from the flash goes through the umbrella, then when it hits the bedsheet.

I put a 30 mm lens on my camera, mounted the camera on a Gorillapod, a small tripod, tilted it, and angled it upwards. I used a radio trigger to set off the flash.

I used a shoot through umbrella as my first diffusion layer. This ensured that the light would spread evenly through the bed sheet. The same multilayer diffusion idea is used in many professional softboxes.

I darkened the kitchen, put the flash on half strength, and ran a few test shots. The trick is to remember that you can darken the kitchen by reducing the exposure time, without affecting the flash pulse at all. then you can increase the aperture to make the light from the flash more intense. Of course, you can also increase or reduce the ISO setting to get the overall effect you want.

In post, I used Aperture to increase the contrast a bit, and erase some reflexes from objects on the kitchen sink. I also cloned out a few tell-tale details on the toy gun. I bought it in a toy store, and if it is well lit, it does not look very dangerous at all.

By shooting from a low angle and tilting the camera a bit, I made the silhouette in the doorway look large and threathening. This is a trick you often see in old movies.

The hat and hiding the face in shadow also contributes to the feeling of danger.

Easy, and fun, and one more thing I can bring back to the Horror Noir project.

I also made a variant photo with my eyes lit. To do that, I needed a very narrow light modifier. I made it out of a pizza box. You can read about it here.