A Scenic World

When I got my first DSLR, I knew I wanted to invest in prime lenses. In fact, the Pentax primes were one of the big reasons (in small packages!) that I bought the brand. The camera came with the kit lens, but I immediately sold that and got the FA 43/1.9. I loved and love this lens, but with an impending trip to Spain and Morocco, I figured I needed  a wide-angle lens for landscapes and a longer lens for portraits, so I bought into the conventional thinking and purchased the DA 21/3.2 for the wide shots and the longer DA 70/2.4 for the portraits.

I took only those three lenses with me on my three-week trip and took a couple thousand shots. I quickly discovered two things: first, that if I want to go wide, I want to go ultra-wide, and second, that there is no one lens that’s better for landscapes than another. The reason…and I know this is ground-breaking…but the reason is that every landscape is different. You might be relatively close to some scenes you want to shoot. Others might be miles away. Some might have interesting foreground elements. Others might just have piles of dirt in front of you. You can’t just automatically assume when you’re standing on the apex of a mountain that the most interesting view is one that takes in all that space. Chances are you might be better off with a 400mm lens in that case (although I wouldn’t want to carry that all the way up the mountain!). Likewise, when you’re taking a photo of that mountain, you might be tempted to take in all that grandeur with a super-wide, but often the majesty would be better served with something like 135mm (case in point: this incredible photo from the inimitable Terry Alford).

When you decide to be a primarily-prime shooter, you really have to make tough decisions before you leave the house, and unfortunately you never really know what landscapes you’re going to run across and what you’ll need. Luckily it seems like you can get good landscape shots with almost any focal length if you give yourself time to find a shot that works with the lens. Conversely, when it just doesn’t work, you have to just move on and try to live with no regrets. Or you could just buy a superzoom.

Here’s a collection of some landscapes I’ve done with varying focal lengths, from widest-to-longest:

@ 12mm with the DA 12-24/4

@ 16mm (with the DA* 16-50/2.8):

@ 21mm (with the DA 21/3.2):

@ 31mm (with the FA 31/1.8):

@ 43mm (with the FA 43/1.9):

@ 70mm (with the DA 70/2.4):

@ 77mm (with the FA 77/1.8):

@ 100m (with the D-FA 100mm Macro – yes, a macro lens):

I’ve written before that if I could take only two lenses with me on an outing where I had no idea what the shooting subjects would be (people? flowers? landscapes?), I’d take my beloved D-FA 100/2.8 Macro and the FA 31/1.8. So when I can only take one lens on an outing, the DA 35/2.8 macro seems like an obvious choice. But is it? How does the macro capabilities of the 35mm compare to the 100mm? Yesterday, I decided to find out.

Truth be told, I don’t normally take “true” macros. A true macro is defined by wikipedia as “meaning the image on the film is the same size as the object being photographed.” This is mainly due to compositional choices; I feel like photos of flowers are often made special by adding something besides just the flower, whether that’s specular highlights (see here) or other elements of composition (see here). In fact, the number of “true” macros I have is astoundingly small, but it’s nice to know that if I have a macro lens with me, the capabilities are there if I need them.

These lenses both focus to true macro. For the 100mm macro, that means that its closest focusing distance is 12″ (30cm). For the 35mm macro, the closest focusing distance is 5.5″ (13.9cm). Their differences can be expressed in a few other ways as well.

I use these lenses on my Pentax K200D which has a cropped sensor, meaning that the sensor is smaller than 35mm standard film (although the crop factor of the K200D is actually 1.53, for purposes of computation, we’ll be using the simplified 1.5). This affects what the field of view of a given lens is. If you spin around once, you’ve taken in a 360° view. If you put a 35mm lens on a film camera,  then when you look through the viewfinder, you’ll see an angle of view of 63°. If you put that same lens on a camera with a 1.5 cropped sensor, your view of the scene changes drastically: you’ll only see about 45° of that same scene.

Likewise, changing lenses will affect your view of the scene. When I put my 35mm on my cropped sensor, I’m seeing a horizontal angle of view (from the left side of the frame to the right side of the frame) of 37.8°. When I switch to the 100mm on my cropped sensor, that horizontal angle of view changes to 13.7°. When we’re pretty far away from our subject, the difference is pretty tremendous. For instance, if I’m standing 10 meters away from a scene with the 100mm lens, the sensor is going to record about 2.5 meters across. By switching to the 35mm, I’m going to be able to take in almost 7 meters!

So how does this translate to the relatively tiny distances when we’re shooting macro?  The 35mm is definitely a wider-angle-lens, but as you’ll see in the examples, the difference isn’t as big as you might think.

The subject would be a red flower found in my friend’s garden. These flowers are particularly small but have nice stamina with visible pollen. I’ve added a little contrast and curved, and I desaturated each image a bit because the pink was really obnoxious, but otherwise these photos all have exactly the same edits with no other fixings (save one photo that was brighter than the others due to camera settings – I lowered the exposure afterwards to match the others). Ideally, a test like this would be done with precise measurements made of distances from the sensor to the subject and with flowers in a controlled studio setting and definitely with a tripod, but I did exactly none of that, so take that as you will. I did manually focus all the macro shots so that the lenses were focused as close as they would possibly go. In other words, this is very much a “real world” test.

First, an example of a semi-macro photo I would usually take with the D-FA 100mm Macro. I was standing approximately 50cm (about 20″) away when I snapped this:

From roughly the same position, I took a photo with the DA 35:

Next I moved closer (30cm away) to get a true macro of the flower with the D-FA 100mm Macro:

Then I switched lenses to the DA 35 and got MUCH closer (13.9cm) to take a true macro with that lens:

As you can see, there’s really not much difference at all!

Next I walked around the bush and looked for another likely subject to be taken from a difference angle. After all, what I was most interested in was how that wider-angle-of-view affected how the background and out-of-focus areas looked.

I found the next subject and took a snap from approximately 30cm (12 inches) away with the 35mm lens:

That same flower, from roughly the same distance, but this time with the 100mm lens:

But as you can see, when I step in closer with the 35mm (to that minimum focusing distance of 13.9cm), I got much the same shot:

So, in the real world, which lens would I prefer to use on a regular basis? Quite apart from how the lenses perform (they’re both pretty sharp even wide-open, but the 35mm generally seems to have the 100mm beat, although the bokeh on the 100mm seems easier to control), they both haves pros and cons.

• Controlling light: You have to get so close to the subject with the 35mm that it’s very easy to block out your light source with the camera. Clear winner: 100mm.
• Focusing distance: Sometimes it can be physically impossible to get as close as you need to with the 35mm (like if a flower is on a branch above your head, for instance). Also, getting close to things like butterflies and bugs tends to scare them away. In this sense, the 100mm is far more useful. Sometimes, though, you’re too close for the 100mm to focus at all – just yesterday I was in the car with the puppy, and he was sitting on my lap and looking out the car window. Luckily I had the 35mm on my camera, or there’s no way I would have gotten that shot. Winner: Tie.
• Ease of shifting view to get most interesting angle: With the 100mm, you often have to physically move yourself to get a more interesting perspective. With the 35mm, even a small shift can make a big difference. Winner: 35mm, but only if you already have good hand control (or a tripod).
• Taking semi-macros: it’s always easier to blur out the background with a longer lens, and semi-macros are no exception. Winner: 100mm.
• Versatility: Some people prefer tight portraits with lots of blurry background. The 100mm is a clear winner in this case. But almost no one’s ever going to take a portrait indoors in close quarters with a focal length like that, so the 35mm would be far more useful in that situation. For landscapes, some prefer capturing details of a scene, so a longer lens like the 100mm would be useful – although something longer would be even better. Other scenes are at their most dramatic taken with a wide-angle lens like the 35mm – although once again, something wider would be even better. Winner: Tie.

So in conclusion, they both do the jobs they were designed to do and do them well. Truth be told, I’m just glad I own them both :)

Disclaimer: Everything you find below is my take on the subject of shooting macros. I have a different style than others, and I don’t mean to profess that “my way” is the right way or the only way – this is more just the thinking behind my way. I’m going to try to approach this from a variety of fronts: from focusing on the subject to focusing on the background and the technical aspects of shooting macro. I’m going to limit the subject to floral and leaf photography for the purposes of keeping it simple (bugs and animals are another story altogether). Questions and comments are always welcome.

What Makes a Good Background?

So, in the previous part of this series, we looked at what makes a good subject. Now we’re going to see what makes a good background, because in many cases, the background is just as – if not more – important than the subject itself. It’s the truly “make-or-break” part of the photo.

A good background can be many things, but the one thing it should always do is complement the subject. Sometimes that means an absence of color – just blackness or whiteness. Sometimes it might be the out-of-focus parts, particularly glowing bits of light. Sometimes it might be other parts of the subject to give context to the subject. And sometimes, there really shouldn’t be any background at all; filling the frame with the subject can provide the best impact of all.

The simplest way to set off the subject is to have a black background. It’s easier to achieve this effect than to achieve white (which I’ll go into in a moment). I wrote a post a long time ago about the ways that I do this, which you can read here.  Generally, if you find a good angle and keep a look out for subjects that have shady areas behind them, you can achieve this effect easily. A tip: use spot metering and make sure that your camera is metering off your subject and not the background. The pros: by providing all of that negative space, they really bring attention to your subject; you can use that negative space to place your subject with the rule of thirds; and black matches nearly everything. The cons: they add nothing of interest.

“Here, Right Here”

The opposite, of course, is the white background. It has the same things going for it (and against it) as the black background, but there’s generally only one way to achieve this: to shoot against the sky (of course, you could bring your own white background, but I’m referring to the ways that I do things, and I’m lazy and only carry what I need). The problem with shooting against the sky is that you can get some serious purple-fringing at the edges and the light generally bleeds around the edges as well, so you have to be really careful with the settings you use. Generally, you should never shoot at wide-open apertures against the sky. Depending on your lens, you might want to stop down to f/8. You also have to be really careful of your exposure. There’s a very decent chance that your camera is going to try to expose for that sea of white and make your subject a silhouette. You might find it easier to switch to manual mode after seeing what settings you camera comes up with. I find that having white backgrounds is much more of a trial-and-error thing than black. Still, it can be effective:

“Sonata in D#”

One of the coolest things about having a DSLR and that large sensor is the shallow depth of field you can achieve. Basically, your subject stays in focus while the background is blurred out. If there are bits of light in the background, you get specular highlights. The parts of the photo that are out-of-focus is called “bokeh.” Depending on your settings, you can really work these into the overall composition of your photo. A long lens with a large aperture will give you big circles of light (although this is dependent on how close the subject is to the lens and how far away the bits of light are). For instance, in this photo, I used a 200mm lens focused as close as it would go and with the widest possible aperture of that lens (f/2.8). There was a car behind the flower, and sunlight was reflecting off of the chrome parts of the car, which made for the specular highlights you see here:

“Dandelion Light”

Using a much shorter lens (35mm) stopped down a bit (from f/2.8 to f/3.5) makes for much different light in the following photo. I realized early on that I wanted to use them in the following photo, but lining up the shot so that some of the interior of the flower showed while still having those pieces of light in the frame made for some tricky maneuvering. Ideally, I think I would have liked to make it seem like the light was coming directly out of the flower, but alas: the sun went behind the horizon before I had a chance to make it work, so this was the next-best outcome.

“Closing Up for the Night”

The way that this out-of-focus light is rendered is an important selling point for many lenses – in general, the higher the lens cost, the more pleasing and regular those lights will be. I’m sure somewhen, somewhere, grown men have come to blows over which lenses provide the best bokeh. I’m not going to touch that issue here except to say that I’m quite happy with how my lenses perform this task.

Sometimes, I flirt with breaking my cardinal rule of “subject-background-and-nothing-else” and try to provide some context for the subject within the photo. Since the main objective is to tell a story with your photo, you often have to include bit players to increase the drama.  The trick here is to still make sure that you still have a clearly-defined subject. One easy way to do this is to shoot as wide-open as possible so that your subject is sharp and the rest is a bit blurry. In the first example, I had found an absolutely beautiful poppy that was being flung about in gale-force winds. At first I tried to wait out the weather, but I think we all know who won that battle. In the end, I decided to try to capture the wind itself by getting both the poppy and the wind-tossed grass behind it in the shot:

“A Poppy in the Wind”

In the next example, there was one bright red tomato hanging on its stem with an array of orange and green tomatoes behind it. It was the contrast of this one vibrant tomato against the rest that caught my eye, so I knew I had to include them in my shot. I used the maximum aperture of my lens to make them appear out-of-focus and clearly in the background:

“Tomatoes”

Finally, there’s one more way to deal with the issue of the background: don’t. Don’t have a background. Fill the frame, from corner to corner, with your subject. This works best, I think, if your subject has strong lines that can still lead the eye around the frame. Diagonals are supposed to be really effective in this regard. Ideally, your subject would have enough interest on its own to hold the photo without a background: colors, textures, repetition, etc. In the first example, this leaf had such a perfectly straight vein through the middle, and one side was red and the other gold, and I felt by throwing off the middle line to one side there was still enough dynamism to carry the photo:

“Leaf Angles”

I have to admit that I usually use this technique with leaves, because I’m so enamored by all the textures and ways those veins interact with the parts between. Especially for a backlit leaf, I’m always reminded of stained glass; including more of the leaf would lessen this illusion, I think. Speaking of illusions, by filling the frame with the subject at hand, you can make it very easy to disguise the true nature of your subject. For instance, in the following photo, there appears to be a subtlely-lit heart. In fact, this is a 1:1 macro of one petal of a small flower.

“We Find Our Hearts in the Most Unusual of Places”

So, there you have it: backgrounds exposed! Next up: the technicalities of shooting macro.