8. Best Practices

The above scenario represents a number of best practices you can employ while working with an assortment of lenses in different shooting environments. This chapter runs through a few of these best practices, from maintenance to photographing different subject matter to techniques that are unique to the lenses (as opposed to the camera).

Before wiping with a cloth, be sure the glass is free of any sand or other abrasive elements that can scratch the glass. Use a fine lens brush or air blower. With your cloth, wipe your lens’s glass in a circular motion, paying extra attention to the area where glass meets the lens construction (the edge of the element). Wipe both outer elements, being extremely careful not to touch either with your fingers, especially the rear element nearest the camera (this one gets tough to clean if it needs any more than just a blow of air and a wipe).

If you need to clean a dusty lens barrel, a lens cloth will work. However, if there are large chunks of dirt or mud (or any sticky material) on the barrel, dampen a normal cleaning cloth and use it to lightly loosen all of the grime. Make sure to wring the cloth out very well before using, lest you get water in the seams and seals around the zoom and/or focus rings and buttons. Keep in mind that this is just for the barrel. If you want to apply a cleaning solution to the front and rear elements, I suggest you use an optic-grade product.

When I do a thorough cleaning of all my gear, I use the air blower to knock the first layer of dust off. I often use the air blower in place of a soft lens brush. I never—and nor should you—use canned air to clean any of my gear, especially my lenses and camera sensors. Canned, or compressed, air often spits and spurts fluorocarbons onto your gear, and the last thing you want is some of this leaking into your lenses. You may never be able to get it out.

Although lightweight, bags with thin, almost paperlike, internal dividers are not very protective. Nearly all camera bags these days come with moveable dividers, and some even come with extra dividers. It is nice to have a bag that can be configured to your needs yet keeps your gear secure in case of a fall (Figure 8.5).

Also compare the bags’ zippers. One of the reasons I use Think Tank Photo is that they use sturdy zippers (Figure 8.6). The last thing I need is a zipper busting loose on my backpack, especially when it’s full of equipment and on my back.

If you are an outdoors photographer, consider getting a bag that has water-resistant or waterproof exterior features, such as special cloth materials, zippers, and covers (Figure 8.7). I often use a Lowepro Pro Trekker when taking long hikes with a lot of gear due to its superior internal padding and water-resistant zipper for the main compartment (Figure 8.8). Take it from someone who has dunked a camera bag full of gear in a river: This is a feature you want.

Some lenses, usually the higher-end L-series pieces, come in their own bags. These are nice for transport when you need to pack a lens in luggage, insulating it from other noncamera gear. However, they are not all that practical when you also own a good camera bag with internal dividers. (I never use the bags that come with my lenses.) The large telephotos come packaged in their own hard-shell cases, but most photographers will acquire bags to transport these lenses more efficiently. The bottom line is there are many camera-gear bags out there. Shop for durability, protection, and comfort (in that order).

As a side, it is also important to turn off your camera when changing lenses or taking one off to store the equipment. Leaving the camera on attracts static-friendly dust. Along the same lines, it is best practice to keep the camera facing downward when changing lenses.

Be sure to store your lens with the cap on. Most camera bags are constructed with internal materials that will not hurt your outer lens elements, but that doesn’t keep you from putting in things (such as loose change) that might. Also, always remember where you put your lens cap. Every time I take off a lens cap, I put it in a pocket, usually my back pocket. I know that when it’s time to return the lens back to the bag, the lens cap is somewhere on my body.

So, what is the alternative if you have to leave your vehicle somewhere for a while? Carry your gear with you. Practice good judgment about your surroundings, but for the most part, you should just schlep your gear around.

When shooting long exposures, the effect of the wind is amplified (Figure 8.14). During these times, simply take the hood off. The lens may still catch a little wind but not nearly as much. A hood for L-series lenses is often big enough that you can place it around your hand and wear it as a bracelet—just in case you might lose it.

Sports and wildlife photographers, event photographers, and many others who shoot in dimly lit environments find Image Stabilization a lifesaver when using slow shutter speeds without a tripod or monopod. Landscape photographers, on the other hand, might have image-stabilized lenses but rarely engage the technology. Image Stabilization is best used when there is a threat of your body’s movement causing blur in your shots. IS excels when you shoot slower than your minimum sustaining shutter speed (Figure 8.16).

Image Stabilization also comes in handy when you are photographing in dark environments, with apertures closed down past maximum (Figure 8.17). Keep in mind, IS only helps you handhold slower shutter speeds. It has nothing to do with freezing the movement of your subject.

When shooting with fast shutter speeds for the lens you are holding, it might be best to disengage Image Stabilization (Figure 8.18). For example, let’s say you are handholding a 300mm focal length and shooting with a shutter speed of 1/640 of a second. More than likely, this is fast enough to handhold without using Image Stabilization. If engaged, IS may shift your composition a bit, and it can even drain your battery.

Likewise, if you are shooting from a tripod, Image Stabilization can often do more damage than good. IS can slightly recompose a shot that was meticulously set up on a tripod. The optics may shift from where you originally intended the frame to be. With longer exposures on a tripod, the IS function may even cause blur based on the amount of movement it makes. The solution? Turn Image Stabilization off when you put the camera on a tripod.

Tripods should not be an afterthought. By shopping around and spending just a few more dollars, a photographer can get an extremely stable tripod that will last. There are a number of tripod brands. I recommend Manfrotto for aluminum and Gitzo for carbon fiber, but you should compare different models. A nice set of aluminum legs and a strong head can cost as little as US$200. Aluminum is heavier than carbon fiber but less expensive (although carbon fiber is coming down in price).

I also advise shopping for legs and heads separately (but looking at the combos or kits in case there is one that contains the legs and head you want). This forces you to analyze the legs separately from the head, making sure both will hold up to the weight of heavy lenses.

There are two ways to mount your camera or lens onto a tripod: by screwing the gear directly onto a ball head—my preference (Figures 8.20 and 8.21)—or using some version of a quick-release (QR) plate that is first attached to the camera or lens and then attached or detached from the tripod head (Figures 8.22, 8.23, and 8.24). Regardless of which type of mount you use, make sure it is metal. Plastic mounts are flimsy and break easily. This is especially true of plastic quick-release plates that mount into plastic heads. Metal mounts can stand under pressure as you tighten your gear to them, resulting in a much more stable platform for heavier lenses.

The mounts that allow you to screw the head directly into the camera or lens are arguably the sturdiest. Although it takes longer to mount the camera and lens to the tripod, once it is there, it is essentially a part of the entire platform. Landscape photographers value this type of mount since they are on a tripod a large percentage of the time. I appreciate the efficiency of the quick-release plate—and often use one with one of my tripods—but the QR mount tends to wobble more than a direct mount to a ball head after some use.

A tripod mount collar also helps prevent the bounce that may occur when you mount a camera body attached to a long lens at the camera. The uneven, out-front weight of such a combo makes the head and camera body flex up and down, potentially bouncing a shot out of focus. Lenses that are not manufactured to mount with a collar, like the EF 70–300mm f/4–5.6 IS, are not considered heavy enough to create such a drastic bounce or flex of the camera and tripod head. However, I have seen these relatively lightweight lenses become more unstable on cheap, drugstore-variety tripods—one more reason to consider a heavier set of legs and head.

For extremely long and heavy lenses—such as the EF 400mm f/2.8L IS, the EF 500mm f/4L IS, and longer—special gimbal heads are often necessary to take on the extreme weight as well as offer superior stabilization and mobilization (Figure 8.26). Wildlife and bird photographers are attracted to these types of heads for their fluid motion, ease of use with heavier lenses, and quality construction. Some tripod and gimbal head setups do come at a price (they can cost into the thousands), but if you can afford to purchase a US$10,000+ lens, you will want to place it on the best platform possible.

Artifact flare can be used to stress extreme personality in a shot, as well as direct the eye to, or away from, something significant. Flare is sometimes used in sports shots and those expressing a characteristic of an environment, such as an oppressive desert climate or barren snowscape (Figure 8.28).

A haze effect is essentially one large flare artifact that covers an entire frame. A haze flare can often be an advantage, warming up an otherwise cool scene, and it is useful in toning a compressed, layered scene. Using flares is an aesthetic choice, but in my opinion, they work well in landscape photography (Figure 8.29). I have also seen them put to good use in portraiture (Figure 8.30).

The process is fairly simple. Find a subject and composition in which you would like to have a starburst accent the scene. The sun must be in the shot, so you will likely be shooting directly into it. The catch is to block much of the sun with the subject matter, such as a tree. Place the sun where branches meet the trunk of the tree or where they branch out even more, among the canopy. Let a bit of sun shine through to the lens right at the point where a branch meets another part of the tree at an angle.

This is where the lens comes into play. Set your aperture to f/8 or higher. This will help focus the sunlight and shape it into what looks like a multipoint starburst. The more closed down the aperture, the more focused the starburst; if the aperture is set wide open, the burst may be indistinguishable. It might take you a few shots to get it the way you want. Be careful not to employ this technique too much if you are shooting editorial work, for risk of being repetitious.

One important tip for using lenses at night: Get the shot set up before the light is gone. For example, you might have a great night shot set up among the stars with a bit of the horizon in it and some structure on the ground that you want the small amount of light to expose while the shutter is open. If it gets too dark before you set up, focusing where you want will be very difficult, given that focus works by detecting contrast in light values. If the focus sensor cannot detect an edge of a subject or the horizon, it makes an educated guess.

The following are a couple more tips for when you’re working the lens at night. Note that these have more to do with long exposures than anything else, and some of these issues have already been covered.

Stars are extremely dim to the camera’s sensor, simply because they are so far away. They may be very powerful, but the distance knocks their intensity out. I start my night sky exposures using an aperture of f/4 or f/5.6. This is particularly fitting for when I want to do extremely long exposures of over 5 minutes (Figure 8.32). At an ISO of 100, f/5.6 is open enough to let in a nice amount of starlight but closed down enough that over a long exposure the stars do not burn too long in one spot. However, it is worth knowing that the more closed down the aperture, the dimmer the overall exposure will be, especially the star trails.

If you want to go for those shots that expose the stars exactly where they are in the sky, instead of star trails, open up your aperture all the way, crank your ISO up, and shoot for around 30 seconds. I really enjoy lenses that open up to f/2.8 for this application, but f/3.5 is great as well. The key is to let in as much light as possible during that 30 seconds and burn the stars on the sensor before the earth rotates enough for trails to be created. That’s why the ISO is cranked high and the aperture wide open (Figure 8.33). Keep in mind that if there is any light near the horizon on which you are pointing, like the residue of a sunset or a city off in the distance, it will register more quickly using this technique.

However, something very interesting happens when you point a wide-angle lens high into the night sky and shoot a long exposure (something long enough to render star trails, like 5 to 10 minutes). This setup may result in trails that arc like a rainbow and another set of trails that arc in a reverse rainbow above the aforementioned trails (Figure 8.34). This usually occurs with ultra-wide-angle focal lengths, such as 14mm. The double arc of trails is the result of the extreme curvature of the lens, where one set of trails curves away from the midpoint toward the horizon and one curves the other way. If the second arc of trails bothers you, angle the lens farther down toward the horizon, reducing the presence of this second arc.

Be open to discussion about some of the issues posed in this book. Everyone operates a bit differently, and you never know what you are going to learn. I know a wildlife photographer who adds ankle weights to lighter-weight telephoto lenses to stabilize them when he is handholding a shot. I never would have thought of that, but it makes sense. Through a relationship with an experienced photographer, you will always be able to glean best practices that might help you in your own image making.

Treat your lenses with care

Assess how you handle your lenses (and all of your gear, for that matter). Is it with care, or are you lax about wear and tear? Do you have the standard accessories for keeping your gear clean? This is a good time to take inventory. If you do not already own them, acquire a lens microfiber cloth, a reputable lens-cleaning solution, and an air blower (not compressed air).

Learn how to use them all. Ask your local camera-store representative to show you how to use each of the items, or lean on online resources, like B&H Photo, for proper care of your glass. Institute a regularly scheduled cleaning (either after every shoot or once a week if the shooting has been light or in clean environments).

Create a starburst

Making starbursts is fun, creative, and easy to accomplish. If you have never performed this technique, start on something small, like a backyard tree. Wait until late evening (or get up early) when the sun is closer to the horizon. Position the tree between you and the sun, and focus on its branches. Put the entire tree in the frame, or select a portion of its branches for your composition. Expose for the sky behind the tree, forcing you to silhouette the tree. Stop your aperture down to somewhere around f/11 or f/16.

The tricky part is placing the sun slightly behind a branch and slightly exposed to the lens. Use your Depth of Field Preview button to stop down your aperture while looking through the viewfinder, and as you position the sun behind parts of the tree, you should be able to see it burst as a star in your frame. Where it bursts is where you want it positioned. Typically, the more you stop down your aperture, the more focused the star becomes. Practice this at home, and then use walls of buildings in cities, water towers, mountains, even flowers! I can’t say starburst shots are in high demand, but they are certainly fun to make.

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