Using the Sigma 150 - 500mm f5 - 6.3 APO DG OS

Hi All,

I hope you're well and enjoying this wonderful summer we're experiencing. It's a bit unusual for the UK to be enjoying so much sunshine !!

Back in May I purchased a Sigma 150 - 500mm lens.

 I'd always wanted a good long lens but for some reason I never actually got around to purchasing one. I've been attending quite a few motorcycle race meetings but the images I was getting from my existing long lens really weren't as good as I would have liked so I took a deep breath and purchased the Sigma. 

One Sunday morning when I had a few hours to spare I went out around the Castle Donnington area of Derby to try out the lens. One of the interesting features of this lens is that it has two versions of optical stabilisation. Setting 1 gives stabilisation in both the horizontal and vertical axes which is good for using the lens hand-held. Setting 2 only stabilises the lens in the vertical axis which is great when shooting sporting events such as motorcycle racing where panning in the horizontal axis is required. 

Unfortunately the morning I decided to put this lens to the test was bright but particularly hazy which made for difficult photographic conditions but beggars can't be choosers !

I decided to use the church at Breedon on the Hill as my subject for the tests. 

Using my Nikon D300s I mounted the camera / lens combination on a tripod as sown below. 

Setting the Optical Stabilisation to the off position I focussed on the church with the lens set at the 150mm (shortest length) position. Using a cable release I took the shot below.

Sigma 150 -500mm Lens set at 150mm on a tripod (no stabilisation)

This image has been processed in Lightroom 4 and a slight vignette added to tone down the sky a little.

Next I set the lens to 500mm (longest length) position, re-focussed and then took the shot below to show the available magnification. As with the shot above this image has been adjusted in Lightroom 4 but NO cropping was done just a vignette.

Sigma 150 -500mm Lens set at 500mm on a tripod (no stabilisation)

As can be seen the lens is equally capable of performing well at both ends of its range.  The next test was to try out the optical stabilisation. I moved position and removed  the camera from the tripod. Putting the lens to its maximum focal length (500mm) and using it hand held with the camera in the Program (P) mode I took the shot below. 

Sigma 150 -500mm Lens set at 500mm hand-held (stabilisation setting 1)

Once again no cropping has taken place just some slight tweaking in LR4 to adjust exposure. As you can see the optical stabilisation in Setting 1 (both axes) has effectively eliminated camera shake.  

The next test involved trying Stabilisation setting 2 (one axis). This meant waiting until I had a fast moving object that I could pan with. I had to wait until I went to the Cock O' the North motor cycle road race in Scarborough  before I could really put this one to the test. Once again I was hand-held with the lens at maximum focal length (500mm) and the camera in manual. The example below is just one of many taken that day using the lens in this mode. As you can see the stabilisation has allowed for the camera to be panned without affecting the focusing ability of the lens. 

Sigma 150 -500mm Lens set at 500mm, hand-held (stabilisation setting 2)

 More images from the racer can be found on my website at http://carrington-imagery.weebly.com/cock-o-the-north-road-race---olivers-mount-scarborough-july-2013.html

All in all I'm very pleased with the performance of the lens and I'm looking forward to getting out and putting it to use again soon.

Made For Mono

Hi All,

During the week I was looking through my image catalogue in Lightroom when I spotted an image I took last year during a trip with the Derby City Photographic Club to Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire.

The image is of Lacock Church which is situated a short walk away from the Abbey in the village itself. 

The image itself is pretty unassuming but when I viewed it again it seemed to be crying out to have something done to it. The something I decided to do was convert it to a mono image and see what happened. 

Below is the start image. 

Lacock Church (Wiltshire)

Stage 1 was to bring the image into Photoshop CS6 as a RAW file. Then I converted the image layer to a smart object then opened it in the Camera Raw interface to create a dual conversion. One conversion for the main body of the church and one conversion to bring out the detail in the sky. I then masked the conversion to bring back the original image of the church but with the new sky as below. 

Image after dual conversion in Camera Raw

As you can see the conversion worked although it left two problem areas. The first are was around the top of the tree on the right hand side, It was quite difficult to select each of the bright areas when creating the mask especially as any amount of feathering made more of a mess. The second troublesome area was by the top of the steeple which, as can be seen, has a blown out area created by the sun. Selective use of the clone stamp tool soon eliminated both problem areas. 

Image after cloning on the tree. 

It was now time to convert the image to mono. For this I decided to use Silver Efex Pro by Nik Software. This is one of the best, if not THE best, pieces of software for Mono conversions. 

I selected the Full Contrast pre-set and made a few slight adjustments to the sliders to bring out the structure of the brickwork in the church and also enhance the sky. The image really didn't seem to need much more than that. 

The final image is below. I feel it's a much more dramatic image when converted to mono. As always it may not be to everyone's taste but I really like it. 

Lacock Church Final Image. 

Something interesting from something ordinary ?

Hi All,

Here I am again with another blog post. 

This time I'm trying to take a fairly ordinary image of three services signs (water) and trying to do something with it to make it a little more interesting and maybe even striking.  I took the image below because I liked the way the signs stood in a row. The day was pretty cold with very little ambient light. I put the D300s on my Manfrotto Tripod and composed the image. 

The camera was set at 1/250" @ f4.8 with an ISO of 500. I had my Sigma 18 - 200mm set at 52mm.  At those settings I took the image shown below. 

Three In A Row

The camera was set at 1/250" @ f4.8 with an ISO of 500. I had my Sigma 18 - 200mm set at 52mm. 

When I got the image into the computer I still liked the composition but the actual image lacked something. There was a certain punch and vitality missing. 

I opened the image in Lightroom 4 and began messing around with it. I added saturation, contrast and Vibrance but it didn't do what I wanted it to do.

So I reset it again and opened it into Nik Soft's Color Efex Pro. I began to explore the various presets until I came across the Bleach Bypass setting. I liked the initial effect so adjusted some of the controls until I liked what I saw. Whilst in Color Efex Pro I added a small border and a slight vignette. 

The final image can be seen below. I'm sure it's not to everyone's taste but I really liked it. 

See you next time ....

Icy Day

Hi All,

I don't know what it's been like where you are but here in Derby it'd been pretty cold for the last few days. Yesterday (Saturday) we had a lot of snow and that continued into today. On Saturday evening the temperature dropped down below zero causing ice to form then the snow came again on top of the ice. It was bitterly cold in the wind but the weird weather did have some interesting side effects. The excess water caused by the snow melted slightly before re-freezing causing some interesting icicles to form. 

Whilst I was sat having a lazy Sunday afternoon I happened to notice that icicles had formed on the Red Robin tree outside my front window. I couldn't resist grabbing the camera and snapping a few shots. 

I took these very quickly using my 50mm Sigma Macro lens on ISO 100. 

They're not too bad for quick snaps !!

Paper Sizes and Aspect Ratios, confusing ?

Hi All,

One of things that causes me a lot of confusion in digital photography is aspect ratios and standard print sizes. I'm sure that for a lot of people out there this particular subject doesn't cause them a problem but, sadly for me, it does.

My D300S sensor is a 2:3 aspect ratio so if I want to send one of my images for printing which standard size paper can I print to without getting the image cropped ? 

Most printers print at A4 and a lot of photo paper manufacturers make paper to fit the A4 printer. However an image generated by a 2:3 sensor doesn't fit exactly on an A4 sheet therefore I can either print the image smaller than A4 or risk losing some of the image if I print to fit A4. 

Trying to visualise how much will get lost is almost as big a problem as trying to work out the ratios in the first place.

Thankfully my son Ben is, unlike his dad, a bit of a whizz when it comes to maths and ratios. So after some long discussions and a lot of patience on his part I finally got me head around sizes and ratios. My problem is that I tend to forget very easily. 

So in a slack moment (very rare at this location let me tell you!) I decided to create an image in Photoshop that, when printed on an A4 sheet would give the viewer (me) an instant idea of what would fit to what. 

The images is below and if you save it to your hard drive and print it to an A4 printer you may also find the visual reference useful.

Please feel free to give it a go. Apologies if it doesn't work on your printer.

Colour Pop Image

Hi All,

Back in November I took a trip across to the National Arboretum over in Alrewas near Burton-on-Trent. It was a particularly dull day but I tried to make the best of it although the lighting was bad all day. 

There was a heck of a lot to photograph and in the end I took over 100 images. The images are available to view on my main website at www.carrington-imagery.co.uk. 

I'd arrived a few days after armistice day so there were lots of poppy wreaths around but the wreath on the  image below struck me as particularly striking. The monument was in battleship grey and the poppy wreath stood out so boldly even in the dull light. 

When I got the image in the home and into the computer I noticed that it didn't stand out as much as I'd remembered it on the day.

I tried various ways to try to make it as I remembered it and then it struck me that if I converted it to monochrome and then colour popped the poppy wreath then maybe that would go some way towards making it appear correct. 

I converted the image to monochrome in Nik Soft Silver EFEX Pro then used Photoshop CS6 to carefully mask the background so that I could paint in the colour of the poppy's. 

The result is as you see below. 

I'm really happy with it. It still retains a little of the dullness of the overall light and also of the battleship grey but at the same time the poppy's come crashing through.

Wedding Photo using the Nikon CLS System

Hi All,

Apologies for the long delay since my last post. Sadly I've been pretty busy at work and just haven't had time to post for a while. Hopefully all that will change now and I intend to get a few more posts out during the year.

So on to this post... In September last year I was asked to photograph my Nephew's wedding. The venue had a really nice staircase extending to some unused rooms above the main hall. I wanted to take a photograph that was a little different to the normal sorts of wedding pictures. The couple had decided to have THREE Best Men in attendance so I decided to try to capture the Bride and Groom and the three Best Men in one shot. 

I'd already taken some shots of the happy couple on the stairs using a single flash so I thought I'd take the opportunity to get the Best Men in to the picture. 

I stood the couple on the stairs just below my shooting position and asked the Best Men to stand in the door way near a string of party balloons. 

I set the Nikon SB-910 on my D300S to commander mode in iTTL. I then set my Nikon SB600 in remote mode also set at iTTL. I set the SB600 remote strobe on the top of a lighting stand and asked my daughter Becki to stand to the right of the Best Men with the light pointing towards them as shown in this diagram.

With everything set I took a couple of test exposures to make sure that everything was in the right place and illuminated correctly. Once I was happy I took the final shot seen below. I was pretty happy with the result and it captures the feeling of the day really well.

My thanks to Katrina and Duncan for letting me use this shot on my blog.