The female touch – British Journal of Photography

We find that the interest in photography is no longer dominated by men, quite the opposite in fact and women are taking social portraiture by storm, scooping many of the major awards, and shaping the direction of the industry. Miranda Gavin investigates why.

via The female touch – British Journal of Photography.

 

 

Camera Sensor Cleaning Techniques

From those very clever people at Cambridge in Colour a useful tutorial on how to clean the sensor on your camera. You may be aware of spots appearing in areas of clear tone in your pictures, areas like blue sky, these are almost always caused by dust on the sensor. This in depth article explains how to resolve the issue and explains about use of brushes, blowers and other stuff.

“If you’re using an SLR camera, you’ll eventually encounter spots in your photos due to a dirty camera sensor. If it hasn’t happened yet, don’t worry — it will. When it does, you’ll need to know if what you’re seeing is indeed from sensor dust, or is instead the result of a dirty viewfinder, mirror or lens. Most importantly though, you’ll need to know how to clean the sensor, and how to minimize the risk of this happening again.”

Six of the best portrait lenses – British Journal of Photography

A lot is spoken of when considering a portrait lens, that is a lens specifically designed for portraiture rather than a lens that could suitably be used for portrait photography. The tradition is for a portrait lens (when used on a 35mm film camera or on a full frame digital slr Canon 5DMk2 Nikon D700 etc.) to have a focal length between 85mm and 105mm. Naturally though you can use a lens of any focal length to take portraits if you wish. Portrait lenses also have a wide maximum aperture e.g. the Canon 85mm is F1.2. This article from BJP describes and reviews 6 lenses that are designed for the purpose.

If you do not have a full frame digital camera, say a Canon 500D or a Nikon D3000 you can still benefit from a portrait lens and do so while spending little money. Most non-full frame digital cameras have a smaller image capture chip and so any lens used offers a higher focal length than that stated on the lens itself. Generally a coefficient of about 1.6 is applied, so a standard 50mm F1.8 lens is actually a 80mm F1.8 lens, almost perfect for the job. The Canon 50mm F1.8 is only £90, the Nikon version is about £125. These lenses are not featured in this review but well worth checking out, there will also be F1.4 and maybe F1.2 versions available also but for much more money. The other thing you can do to improve your portrait photography is to take our Portrait Course which starts 27th of this month

Six of the best portrait lenses – British Journal of Photography.