Thinking of getting a new lens for my DSLR

oss - I will give that a try

Peter - I used to know a guy who would tape black bin bags to the windows in his bathroom and use that as a dark room. Laying the trays of chemicals in his bath.... Thankfully things have changed!

I think I mentioned before, but I worked in various darkrooms for 7 years in a previous life, plus another 5 years in and out of the darkroom, it was fun, I miss the smell of developer, stop and fix

Nothing quite matches the gradual appearance of an image on a blank sheet of paper, the sheets I worked with were often A1 and A0 in size and the dev trays were gigantic, had to fold an A0 and keep it moving to get it to process correctly (not a creased fold but a gentle curved fold).

Do you ever find the hood causing vignetting? In the manual of the lens it did say the lens might cause this.. though, with some of my pictures I have digitally added some vignetting to focus the eyes on the subject.

I will be using the hood tomorrow when I toy around again..

All digital camera's experience vignetting but not because of the hood encroaching on the angle of view, it happens because photosites (pixels) are vertical tubs that photons (light particles) fall into, as you get progressively further from the centre of the sensor the angle that the light falls onto the sensor at ever more acute angles and is in effect less intense. the effect is more pronounced the larger the sensor and can be up to 1 stop or more difference centre to edge depending on the lens.

This is one of the reasons that there exists such a thing as a "digital lens", it does not mean the lens is digital, it means that the optics have been engineered to make the light cone that exits the rear lens element be as perpendicular as possible, this is quite a feat and is easier to achieve in telephoto lenses rather than wide angles, wide's will vignette a lot more.

If the hood is the one specifically for that lens it will be perfect, and you should always use it, however it would not have helped in the outside night shot you posted earlier Sean, as there the light source is in the frame.

Hmmm, I will be using the camera quite a lot tomorrow evening as my nephews band "Prose" will be performing a gig. So I will be shooting in a dimly lit bar with whatever stage lighting they have.

I am planning to shoot with just the 35mm. Do you reckon I should take my zoom along as well?

Sometimes stage lighting is good enough to allow you to use a zoom that's not particularly wide but it will be hard getting a decent shutter speed to freeze the action unless the stage lights are pretty bright.

The 35 should be fine if you are reasonably close to the stage, more often than not you will want to concentrate on close up faces and expressions rather than wide shots of the whole band, perfect chance to test the flare issue as many of the light sources will be in the field of view.

Definitely use the lens hood to help protect the 35mm.

I plan to hover about that stage

You'll probably be best with the 35 then, although your zoom could be occasionally handy for tight framed shots if the light is good enough.

You might even find that if you are close up you don't need 1600 or 3200 ISO, do some tests and check on the display to see if they are good, then try manual settings i.e. manual f number and shutter as the highlight exposure will not change dramatically when the lights are on.

What this means is that the camera is not trying to meter bright then dark then bright then dark and getting it just wrong as the light has changed before the shutter fired. Dark is dark but if there is one light and highlight in the scene then the manual exposure for that bit will still be correct even though everything else is dark.

If you manage this and get a good manual setting you can stay on that for quite a while and get some nice mood shots as a result of the lighting.

An example from 'The Library' in Malate



This was taken using a 50mm on a full frame camera f2.2 1/80th of a second at ISO 400.

If the camera had been left to it's own devices the dark area's would all be too bright and the highlights would be washed out almost impossible to see any detail.

If I had been right up standing in front of the guy, the exposure would have been exactly the same, not that you ever want to be at the front in 'The Library' if you are a foreigner

Hmm, will check it later. Flickr is blocked in work...

Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh... Now I see. Excellent shot