Sigma 10-20mm wide angle

After many days of deliberations I made a decission to go with the new Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens. This lens was a need tool not only for it's landscape capabilities but I needed a wider lens capability for shooting retail store interiors for a trade publication.

The first day with the lens I went out and took these shots at Jasper Park's, Maligne Canyon. This lens was in it’s element in these narrow canyon cuts and towering frozen water falls. The effects of this lens are amazing but as I've now learned some of the distortion can be eliminated with proper technique. Still it was a lot of fun in this canyon setting.

The Sigma 10-20mm wide angle is, with my brief experience, a great extention to my 18-200mm. The wide angle 10-20mm zoom gives it a versatility that I didn’t expect. This is a sturdy well built lens that functions smoothly. The auto focus is quick, precise and very quiet. At F4-5.6 it’s not fast but I’m finding that I’m using it mostly for scenic shooting and bright interior locations.

I'll add more comments as I gain more experience with the lens.

I highly recommend it if you can find one.

December Frost

This December mother nature offered up some wonderful landscape photo opportunities.
These were taken on a Saturday morning. The air was heavy with fog, frost was on everything and the ground had a new covering of snow from two days earlier. This white on white landscape was a challange to work.


These images tend to be more emotional, so, capturing that feeling is the challenge. A seasoned film photographer said to me once, “you should always under expose the image slightly so you don’t loose detail” and that’s still a good rule in this situation.

Exposure or white balance bracketing of your images in these conditions is the safest and easiest way. Then you can process HDR in CS2.

I like to capture the image in a some what old fashion way. With my D200, if I like the subject, I’ll spend a little time and experiment using sometimes 3 metering settings; 3D (with a “D” lens), group metering and spot. Then adjusting the F stop on each setting, by eye using the preview, I’ll try to capture what I’m visualizing in the image. I might blow it out intentionally just to give a it softer detail or step it back to give me more detail and deepen the contrast, or change the depth of field. Some of the essentials for a B&W composition which these conditions mostly dictate.

All this is done knowing that in the studio I already have an idea of the post processing needed to achieve the final result.