Traditional Christmas Family Portrait with Natural Light

This weekend, I took a photo of our family for our Christmas card.  In this post, I'll describe the thought process behind the photo.

Different Cameras & Lenses, Same Point of View

This should be an interesting post to some of you, see that swing in the picture? I take pictures of my daughters ever year in the summer on this exact swing, where they spend the summer vacation time by the seaside. I wanted to make a comparison between the different pictures taken from the spot, with different cameras and lenses, over the years.

What camera/lens combination would you say was used to capture the above picture?

Environmental Portrait: Go Short or Long?

If you were to take an environmental portrait, should you use a short focal length or long focal length?

Canon Lenses Chat - Part 2: Telephoto Zoom Lenses

Hello again, this post will be a sequel to my previous post where I chatted about the Canon standard zoom lenses. Today I will chat a little about some of Canon's telephoto lenses.

Well, if you have read the previous installment you should know that I don't really fancy the super zooms like the Canon EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS (7.5x) , Canon EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS (11x) or the Tamron AF18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD (15x), they usually say that if a lens has more than 5x zoom then there will be some compromises, I am not saying that these lenses are useless but you have to give up some quality to get this amazing zoom range, they are very useful as walk around lenses given how small and light they are but that sort of defeats the purpose why I would want a DSLR. I have bought the Canon EF-S 15-85mm lens to replace my default kit lens because I didn't like the kit lens' performance regarding sharpness, focusing speed, chromatic aberration and range.

Anyway, back to our topic, I made my lens choice when I bought the camera, it was my first DSLR and I had no idea how things would go with the lenses and stuff (maybe if I knew then how much I will end up paying I wouldn't have done the switch), but after lurking around the dpreview forums for a while I found about the ultimate cheap kit for beginners which was the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS kit lens ($170 or $0 for me since I would get it with the camera anyway) + Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS ($250) + Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II ($100). So by just spending $250 for a lens I would get an excellent range and the reviews were very happy with how this lens performed given its price, so that was it for me, I didn't want to pay a lot of money on the lenses and I would have the range from 18mm to 250mm all covered so I bought it, what else would I ever want? Little did I know then.

UPDATE: This post is updated with samples of the "close focusing distance" capability of the 55-250 kit lens.