Recent content by PaulCowan

By the way, there is no need to strive for shallow DoF, you get it anyway, so forget f1.4 lenses. It is more of a problem getting enough in focus, even shooting at f11 or so, depending on the lens. Your choice of focal point is as critical as the lighting and the composition. The use of tilt...

Unless your food is still running around you can use long exposures rather than high ISO. Achieving really good results with food is far, far more difficult than you might think. That's why there are so many glossy food-photo cookbooks with photos ranging from the poor to the awful (and also...

It depends. I have with my 5D Mk2 but that doesn't seem to be an option with the original 5D.

I went to a lecture by one of the top bird photographers not long ago. He stressed the importance of understanding the behaviour of your subject, using hides (even shooting from a car can help as birds apparently haven't connected cars with people yet); noting that birds can count to two, so if...

What camera?

"... very few images lend themselves well to square composition. In general it is the most difficult format to work with, and most design strategies for a square frame are concerned with escaping the tyranny of its perfect equilibrium... ... occasionally a precise symmetrical image is...

Rectangular formats were used way before 35mm was ever thought of - and before film was invented. Go to any art gallery and see what proportion of Old Masters used a square canvas. It was natural for the golden mean ratio idea to percolate from art into photography right from the start. See...

I take it these are from your Nettar 645? It looks as if you have a good one. Try a colour film in good light with reasonably careful exposure and you should get some really good stuff out of it.

I had one but I chucked it out when I realised it was an FD mount.

It depends on the coating. Modern lenses are all multi-coated, older M42s often have single coating. You'll also notice that the strength of different colours sometimes varies, the multicoated Zeiss Jena lenses tend to enhance blues. As you say, it is easy to adjust this to your taste in the...

Canon cameras are just as reliable as Nikon ones, you've just been unlucky. If this was anything other than an isolated incident the problems would be all over the internet. There's no sense in changing over.

check out the depth of field calculator online, it think the website is DoFmaster, or some such. Bear in mind that you only need to focus as far as the furthest wall, not to infinity. Assume your lens will be zoomed out to 22mm because anything shorter will simply make things better, and aim to...

Assuming you are using a very wide angle lens, such as 20mm on full format, at f8 you can get a depth of field from about 2ft to infinity.

Those who buy them without needing them keep the price down for those of us who actually do need them :D

But canon doesn't claim them as being weather sealed, does it? The Luminous Landscape report says: "Canon had loaned me a 5D MKII which my business partner Chris Sanderson intended to also use to shoot a video documentary on our trip, but regrettably it failed in the rain on our first day...