Cee’s Compose Yourself Challenge: Week #1 How your camera is not like your eye

October 3, 2015 by sonyavdg 1 Comment

How your camera is not like your eye

Cee has started a new photo challenge this week, encouraging us to pay attention to particular aspects of composition.  She has stated off with the theme of “how your camera is not like your eye” with a focus on focal length.  I had a look through my metadata in lightroom and as I suspected the vast majority of my photos are shot between 16 mm and 55 mm.  That is the range of the kit lens I keep on my Sony A6000.  I love the compact size of that camera and carry it with me pretty much all of the time.

There is then a pretty big range where I have taken very few photos before another cluster at 300mm – the extreme of the Tamron 16 – 300 which I have on my Canon T3i.  These days I usually only take the Canon out when I am planning sports or animal photography and push it all the way to 300.

Today I took the Canon on a walk round the Ohariu Valley and Old Coach Road to experiment with the mid range focal lengths I don’t use very often.  The shots above were all taken at 70 mm.  There was no particular reason for choosing 70mm except that it is marked on the Tamron so I could be consistent with the lens (since focal length is not displayed on the T3i or at least I don’t know how to bring it up).

On the crop sensor T3i 70 mm has some telephoto characteristics and I found it an interesting challenge shooting at this focal length.  I couldn’t easily picture what the shot was going to look like until I saw it in the viewfinder.

Cee also suggested that we look at the same scene with different focal lengths which I did with these shots of the Makara Wind Farm.  I would normally take shots of this wide if I was focussing on the landscape or zoom right in to make the windmill itself a clear subject.  I this case I actually quite like the 70 mm shot.

See what other bloggers have done with focal length at Cee’s Compose Yourself Challenge