Natalie Tootie

Today I received my first lens for my digital camera, aside from the one it came with. It is the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II. The reason to buy an SLR is for the quality of the photos they take, but also because of the fact that you can buy different lenses. In previous posts I documented my trouble taking bodybuilding photos with the included lens, hence the purchase of this new lens. The key part is f/1.8. This relatively low number means the lens lets in a lot more light. This in turn means you can get faster shutter speeds in low light situations where a flash won’t work, such as indoor sports photography. For comparison, the lens that came with the camera ranges from f/3.5 to f/5.6 depending on the focal length. The new lens only has one focal length.

To test it out, I took some pictures in my apartment with the blinds closed which is a pretty low light environment, much lower than even a bodybuilding competition. No flash was used, of course, and the pictures were taken at ISO 1600 in aperture priority mode with the aperture set to 1.8 leading to the highest possible shutter speed. In this case, that turned out to be 1/160th of a second, which is pretty decent for the amount of light available.

JPEG Evaluative Metering

RAW Evaluative Metering

RAW Partial Metering

The photo on the left was taking using the default evaluative metering in JPEG mode. The middle photo used evaluative metering in RAW mode. The photo on the right used partial metering in RAW mode. The pictures get, in my opinion, better from left to right. The bottom set are crops of the top set. It turns out this bottle really represents a bodybuilder on stage very well.

JPEG Evaluative Metering Way overexposed No detail

RAW Evaluative Metering Still overexposed Better color

RAW Partial Metering Correctly exposed Nice detail visible

JPEG vs. RAW First of all, switching from JPEG to RAW saves more information about the photo which means it’s much easier to fix minor problems with the photo once I’ve put them on my computer. All of these photos required white balance correction, but it was much easier with the RAW photos and the final output was better. It was kind of a pain to get the white balance correct on the JPEG photo.

Evaluative vs. Partial Metering The default setting on the camera is to use evaluative metering. This means the camera takes light readings from various places in the frame and tries to guess at how to get the best overall picture from those readings. This is great when you care about everything in the frame, but not so great when you only care about the subject. For those cases, switching to partial metering will meter only the section in the middle of the frame and chose the best lighting for that. This is exactly what I want for this bottle photo, but also for a bodybuilder photo since I don’t really care if the background turns out good. Notice how the bottle on the right has much more detail and the green around the top is nicer. This is because the bottle on the left two photos is overexposed. You can tell by how bright the highlights are. This reduces definition and was exactly the problem with my bodybuilding photos. Notice how much more defined the shape of the plastic top is on the right photo.

Here are some outdoor photos and a photo taken of a CD cover in a dark environment. I didn’t even have to use a tripod.

Tree

Fountain

Kelly Clarkson