Dancer (playing around with photoshop) - Practice with the NEW LENS!!1!!!!!1!1!!one!!eleventy-one!!

Took this photo today with the new lens. I like the idea, but the photo itself could use some fine-tuning.



The focus issue is more my fault than anything, but I have noticed that photos taken with this lens have more grain than I would prefer. But I also deem that I need a lot more time and practice to get used to this lens, as it's got an enormous range and I'm used to only one focal length (50 mm).
So, on this photo, I could only really focus on one point and let her do her thing. Working with AI Servo made the shutter a bit too slow for my liking, considering what I expected the outcome to look like (and I got what I wanted, more or less). I have noticed in other photos, though, that even though I've been very particular with the points I tell the lens to focus on (I do autofocus, but I manually choose my focus points), I was quite disappointed to see that a lot of my photos from today were more focused on the background than my model. I played around with it after I noticed this, and it seems the lens requires a couple extra seconds to adjust on its point of focus, which will take some getting used to considering I like to snap speedily.
One other thing that will take some adjusting is that I usually have my aperture at around 2.5-3.0 for my 50 mm lens, and the lowest f-stop at 50 mm on this lens is 5.0 (bye bye bokeh/pretty background blur ), and because I prefer to keep the aperture at its lowest possible value (for this lens, at least), I had to pay attention to my settings a lot more than I'm used to because the lowest aperture changes for each focal length, and I was certainly taking advantage of my new opportunity to zoom and take photos at various focal lengths. This, again, will simply take some adjusting, since I've learned to be a lazy photographer and go on autopilot (most of the time) once I've found my magic settings, using the single focal length and all.

Now it probably sounds like I'm complaining a lot, but that's just because I realize that this lens is incredibly different from what I'm used to, and it'll take some practice before I'm comfortable with it. There are some things I wish could be improved on this lens (mostly being lower aperture, but I understand that would be hard to achieve with such a wide range of focal length), but the range impresses me and I like the idea of only having to use one lens to get the sort of variation I would previously need to change my lens twice or three times for.
Hopefully in the near future I'll be able to get some more crisp, cleaner looking images with it, however I will probably be going back to my old 50 mm from time to time, because I love that lens to death.

Here are a few more shots from today:

Different lenses can give slightly different color, flare, and softness. But grain is not a lens effect. Either you are shooting at an ISO you are not used to, or the processing is somehow different.

Kelly

KCook wrote: Different lenses can give slightly different color, flare, and softness. But grain is not a lens effect. Either you are shooting at an ISO you are not used to, or the processing is somehow different.

Kelly

Hmmm it could be that my ISO was higher than usual because of the high aperture settings, but I've never had a problem with grain with this camera until now :/ Especially on only 400. I'll play around and see what it may have been though.

It might also be because you're new to shooting in RAW. Your camera will no longer do the in-camera noise reduction that you're used to from shooting JPEG (same with in-camera sharpening). Instead, you get to decide exactly how much NR and sharpening your images need. The small downside is you'll spend an extra minute (or few seconds in a lot of cases) on that, but the upside is the images will be much better when you're handling those things yourself.

Btw congrats on the new lens! What did you get?

rmeyer7 wrote: It might also be because you're new to shooting in RAW. Your camera will no longer do the in-camera noise reduction that you're used to from shooting JPEG (same with in-camera sharpening). Instead, you get to decide exactly how much NR and sharpening your images need. The small downside is you'll spend an extra minute (or few seconds in a lot of cases) on that, but the upside is the images will be much better when you're handling those things yourself.

Btw congrats on the new lens! What did you get?

Thank you!! It's from the contest- tamron 18-270
I bet you anything that's what it is. 5 years getting adjusted to my camera and I've never dealt with raw, so I have much to learn now. I JUST got cs5 with camera raw.... How would I deal with noise reduction and clarity? Some of the sliders confused me

I'm not sure if ACR is much different in CS5 (I use CS3 but do most of my post processing in LR 4, so I rarely even see the ACR interface in PS), but unless they've added it, there's no slider for noise reduction in ACR. Photoshop does have some capabilities for reducing noise though, under Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise. That's definitely worth a try. Zoom to 100% so you can see what it really looks like as you adjust, same with sharpening. I always like to make sure it looks good both zoomed in and zoomed out.

I haven't used the noise reduction in PS much honestly...maybe it's just my imagination but I don't feel like it gives as good of results as noise reduction in some other software. I MUCH prefer Topaz Labs plugins, their Denoise feature is fantastic. It does cost money but IMHO it's one of the most worthwhile software purchases a photographer will ever make. You can try the free trial from their website and see if it's worth the money for you personally.

Why do you need a news lens? 50mm is good for shooting everything.

ALso noise is fine in a photo. Why people spend so much time trying to get rid of noise I'll never know. Noise gicves character.

Lightpuller wrote: Why do you need a news lens? 50mm is good for shooting everything.

ALso noise is fine in a photo. Why people spend so much time trying to get rid of noise I'll never know. Noise gicves character.

That's quite subjective.

Scotty wrote:

Lightpuller wrote: Why do you need a news lens? 50mm is good for shooting everything.

ALso noise is fine in a photo. Why people spend so much time trying to get rid of noise I'll never know. Noise gicves character.

That's quite subjective.

Which subject are you talking about? Sorry sometimes I don't understand jokes.

Lightpuller wrote:

Scotty wrote:

Lightpuller wrote: Why do you need a news lens? 50mm is good for shooting everything.

ALso noise is fine in a photo. Why people spend so much time trying to get rid of noise I'll never know. Noise gicves character.

That's quite subjective.

Which subject are you talking about? Sorry sometimes I don't understand jokes.

It wasn't a joke.

hghlndr6 wrote:

Lightpuller wrote:

Scotty wrote:

Lightpuller wrote: Why do you need a news lens? 50mm is good for shooting everything.

ALso noise is fine in a photo. Why people spend so much time trying to get rid of noise I'll never know. Noise gicves character.

That's quite subjective.

Which subject are you talking about? Sorry sometimes I don't understand jokes.

It wasn't a joke.

Then why make a joke then?

Lightpuller wrote:

hghlndr6 wrote:

Lightpuller wrote:

Scotty wrote:

Lightpuller wrote: Why do you need a news lens? 50mm is good for shooting everything.

ALso noise is fine in a photo. Why people spend so much time trying to get rid of noise I'll never know. Noise gicves character.

That's quite subjective.

Which subject are you talking about? Sorry sometimes I don't understand jokes.

It wasn't a joke.

Then why make a joke then?

He wasn't, he means that what you said is a matter of opinion, and it seems that there are many people here who disagree with yours

Noise can look interesting depending on the photo, but it's certainly not what I was going for in this case.

Leilanee wrote:

Lightpuller wrote:

hghlndr6 wrote:

Lightpuller wrote:

Scotty wrote:

Lightpuller wrote: Why do you need a news lens? 50mm is good for shooting everything.

ALso noise is fine in a photo. Why people spend so much time trying to get rid of noise I'll never know. Noise gicves character.

That's quite subjective.

Which subject are you talking about? Sorry sometimes I don't understand jokes.

It wasn't a joke.

Then why make a joke then?

He wasn't, he means that what you said is a matter of opinion, and it seems that there are many people here who disagree with yours

Noise can look interesting depending on the photo, but it's certainly not what I was going for in this case.

I don't get it. What's that got to do with the photo's subject?

Ok, seriously, since when did Photography talk become troll central? Takes away from the fun, it does.

Leilanee wrote: Ok, seriously, since when did Photography talk become troll central? Takes away from the fun, it does.

What do you mean? Scotty said it's subjective, I just wonder what my opinion on noise has to do with the subject of the image. Since subjective means something related to the subject. No need to accuse me of pretending to be a troll just because I don't understand people's points.