Category: Tips/Tutorials

If, like me, you graduated to digital SLR photography from digital point and shoots, you’re very familiar with zoom lenses: they’re flexible, easy to understand and mean you get tightly-framed shots (or expansively wide landscapes) without swapping lenses or having to walk back and forth to compose your shot.

This sounds good, but for SLRs this flexibility comes at a very high cost in image quality, low-light ability, creative control, price and stealth capabilities.

The truth is, unless you’re completely loaded, most of the time you’d be better off shooting with lenses that don’t zoom – prime lenses.

Let’s look at the benefits:

It’s Christmas Day (the roast’s in the oven, Finn’s asleep and I’ve got a couple of minutes before our friends arrive). As I sit here next to my shiny new Canon 24-105mm f/4L lens – Santa was very good to me this year – I’m thinking of all the digital SLR cameras that people found under the Christmas tree today.

This time last year I didn’t have a digital SLR, and I’d just started using my film SLR again. Now I’ve had an article and photos published in national and local publications, sold prints as wedding presents and spent a huge amount of time shooting and learning.

So if you’re wondering where to start with your new camera, here are a few pointers from someone who’s on the same journey as you, just a little further along.

I must confess to have been only vaguely aware of the wide differences in the way colours are displayed online – until recently. Or rather, I was aware of the differences from testing sites in different OS and browser combinations, but I was only vaguely concerned – Macs’ 1.8 gamma meant a difference from PC’s 2.2, and every now and again in my work as a web designer, I’d get a photo to edit that had a colour profile attached, but that was it.

And I was partly right about this – unlike the print design world, where color profiles for monitors, printers and the like are carefully controlled, and there’s a real struggle to get color matching as right as it can be, in the online world, we have to be a little more flexible.

Almost all of our audience wouldn’t know a calibrated monitor if it ate their lunch, and most browsers (the programs, not the people) are a sorry bunch that don’t support color management anyway. It’s a sRGB world, for better or worse. Or so I thought.

It’s been out a while, but I thought I’d bring this Online Photographer article to your attention, if you’ve not seen it.

Written by New York Times photographer Howard French, it outlines how he uses Flickr as a professional, and counters some of the criticism he gets from fellow pros, who argue it’s a site full of rubbish.