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Cory Photography with Tom and Pat Cory |
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Iceland, 2008 |
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Newsletter, December, 2009 |
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Cory Photography Newsletter 38 December 5, 2009
In this edition you will find:
Sigma Digital 18-250mm Lens Winter and Holiday Photography Wilderness Wildlife Week, January 9-16 Darkroom Equipment for Sale 2010 Schedule
Hello!
We hope that you had a happy Thanksgiving and are getting ready for the remainder of the holiday season. This is a time of year that offers many photographic opportunities both with family and friends, and also in your community.
We have had a busy fall season with our workshops. One situation that was particularly interesting was photographing 8 Civil War Re-enactors from the 37 Tennessee Infantry, Co. H during our Chattanooga Photo Safari. These guys were great and we are now having fun working on the images in Lightroom. You can easily use presets to turn the color images into black and white, sepia or old color and then tweak them to make them look like they are from the period.
We are taking a little breather with our workshop schedule next year to allow us to do a bit more traveling on our own. We will still have our annual Smokies workshop and two international tours, going back to Iceland and offering Morocco for the first time. The remainder of our workshops will be shorter workshops closer to home and several will be added as the year goes along. We will still be offering individual lessons as well. (These can all make great Christmas presents.) Speaking of presents, we have books and DVDs for sale.
We wish you and your family a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year with many great photographic opportunities.
Tom and Pat
Sigma Digital 18-250mm Lens
We have just purchased the new Sigma Digital 18-250mm lens from Gary at Hunt’s Photo. It looks like it will be a nice travel lens with the zoom translating into a 28-400 35mm equivalent on our Canon 50D. It also will focus to 19 inches at all focal lengths making it a reasonable lens for close up photography. It comes with a lens hood rather than making you pay extra for it like with Canon lenses. So far it appears to be quite sharp in the middle range, from 50-350. It isn't quite as sharp at the extreme wide angle and telephoto ranges, typical for these lenses with a long zoom range, but that still leaves a lot of focal lengths to choose from. A few disadvantages are that it is a bit heavy, it has a maximum aperture of f/6.3 at the long focal length range, and the auto-focus is not as fast in low light. All in all though it appears to be a good value for this range of focal lengths.
Winter and Holiday Photography
Winter offers a number of diverse photographic opportunities. If you are a nature/travel photographer, you will undoubtedly be the one assigned to take the holiday pictures. It's a good idea to practice a little bit ahead of time and make sure you have charged batteries and plenty of space on your memory card so it won't be quite as stressful when the request comes. Since many of the family photos are taken inside you will most likely be dealing with low light issues. Our first tendency is likely to use flash but you may have better results if you first try getting your subject near a window (keep the window out of the picture) or turning on all the lights you can. Using a higher ISO may also help you to capture the image without flash. Just check to make sure your camera is not picking up too much noise at the higher ISO settings. If you are shooting JPEG files be sure to adjust your white balance to a setting that gives you the truest colors. If you must resort to flash, practice a bit with the fill flash on your camera or your external flash. Remember the goal is to make your image look like you didn't use flash. Most cameras will allow you to adjust the intensity of the flash or you may want to change where you are standing, moving a little closer or a little further away and zooming your lens in or out to adjust the intensity and your composition.
You may also want to experiment with holiday lights since it can be difficult to get detail in both your subject and color lights at the same time. Holiday lights are usually best with the tungsten white balance setting on your camera. Also, photographing outside lights at twilight when there is still some light in the sky but it’s dark enough for the lights to be seen is often your best choice. You will want your camera to be on a tripod. If all else fails, select a very slow shutter speed and intentionally move or swirl the camera—you may get some interesting results.
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