Second Shot

I was going to write a pretty scathing analysis on my photography skills that Ian and Hoi’s kindly requested from me for their Chinese ceremony. But I won’t.

And this is mainly because most of the photographs are pretty good and only require a few little touches to make them better. As I was expecting, really. But I’m still editing them as I’ve been pretty busy recently and, well, because I’m a perfectionist and if I’ve been asked to do something, I might as well put the effort into getting something out of it for myself.

I’ve definitely learnt a whole load of things to watch out for the next time I’m asked to do some photograph work; not even close to being a wedding photographer (although the money pays well, I still don’t think I want that weight upon me), but not bad for a few nice snaps. I was reading up about wedding photography, more specifically wedding photojournalism – the difference being that the latter is there to document the event, tell the story, all without staging anything. I kind of like that sort of work, suits my sneaky-sneaky shoot-from-the-hip attitude.

One of the main things I concluded was that my current camera lens isn’t great for indoor photography (although, admittedly, it served me well for the large family photograph). So, I decided that I needed (read: wanted) to get a faster lens. And that’s exactly what I did. From eBay.

eBay?! Second hand?! For a camera lens?! Pah!

Yet, I kid you not, even to my untrained eye the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 Mark II is a superb bit of glass and is a great (and probably final) addition to my lens range. I was testing it out earlier, under internal lighting, fully open aperture and shot some nice, clean photographs of the niece and nephew. I instantly looked past the orange tint from the lighting (didn’t set the correct white balance) and saw the future; I can now do some decent portrait shots with good brokeh behind the subject. Even taking a picture of the label inside a pair of jeans turned itself into ‘art’.

Only bug bear is that it’s on the Canon 400D with its cropped sensor, which means it’s effectively an 80mm lens. That’s pretty close for indoor shooting (except portraits). I’m going to lose a lot of wide-angle advantage of my other 17-70mm and the flexibility that it affords; I’m just going to have to stand further back from the subject.

Mind, it does give me an excuse to get a full-frame camera…