Mar-Photos.com, my photography website, is getting a refresher! It is getting a new look and new images. I am still working on it, but you can have a preview of the website already. Here’s the link for you:
Mar-Photos.com – Marek Mularczyk Photography.
I will be adding more images, there are nine so far (the best ones 
) and you may expect more soon.
I hope you’ll enjoy it and if you like it, let me know by posting here.
Enjoy!
Let’s talk a bit more about photography and lenses in particular.
In the last few posts we talked about photography, cameras and lenses. Today, I want to expand on that. A bit more on lenses, apertures to be exact.
When purchasing a lens one of the decisions to make is to decide whether you’re happy with a lens with a variable aperture i.e. an aperture that changes as the focal length changes. Not all zoom lenses have variable apertures, many professional zoom lenses have an aperture that doesn’t change.
A variable aperture is one of the signs of cheaper lenses (cheaper doesn’t mean bad) and sometimes you’d be fine with a variable aperture. So what if the aperture changes as you zoom in? For example, a lens that I use is an EF-S 17-85mm F4-5.6, so the aperture at 17mm is F4 and as you zoom in to around 35mm it changes to F4.5 and then to 5.6. Besides I think that with these focal lengths you don’t really use small apertures anyway. The best results are achieved with apertures F6.7-8 and more.
I hope this gives you some idea on lenses and apertures. You need to decide and you may have a different opinion from mine. That is fine.
So, why is the Lens so important (I mean camera lens here)? Why so many photographers or experts say that the lens is more important than the camera?
Let’s start by looking at how the lens works.
source:Wikipedia, author: Bill EbbesenLens is a number of glasses put together to filter the light through to the camera sensor (or film in the past). The main job of a camera lens is to focus light onto the camera sensor. It seems like a simple job, but it’s actually very complicated. You want the image to be sharp all across the image not just in the centre as an example and that’s not that easy to accomplish. And it gets even more complicated when we talk about the zoom lenses. It is so much more complex with zoom lenses as the lens needs to keep on focusing correctly as you change the focal length. It is a complicated stuff with a lot of technology involved.
Let’s talk about focal length.
Something you’ll find out from the Focal Length is the field of view. Focal length is actually a very important part of a lens specification. If you’re new to photography, a focal length of 50mm is a standard – a lens with 50mm focal length is a standard lens. In the past if you were to buy a new camera (a film camera), you would get a 50mm lens – usually 50mm F1.8.
The shorter the focal length of the lens, say 35mm or 28mm, the wider field of view, and that’s why these lenses are called “wide angle lenses”. The longer the focal length of the lens, say 100mm or 200mm, the narrower field of view, and these lenses would be called “telephoto lenses”. Prime lenses, lenses with one focal length, are of better quality than zoom lenses. Zoom lenses, on the other hand, give photographers the ability to take photos at different focal lengths without the need to change the lens. But it comes at a price – quality. If the quality is your primary concern, go for prime lenses (if you can tell the difference in the quality of images of course).
Aperture is another very important factor to consider when purchasing a lens. Aperture is described in numbers, from F1.0 through F2.8 to F32 and more, and it describes the size of the opening in the lens that allows the light to go through. It is measured in F-stops and it is described as a fraction of the focal length. So, basically the bigger “number” the smaller the opening in the lens. Let me give you an example:
The bigger the opening in the lens (the lower F-stop value) the more light gets into the lens and onto the sensor. That means you get more light to work with. That’s why the lower F-stop value, the more expensive lens (50mm F1.4 is more expensive than 50mm F1.8).
More on the subject in future posts.
Hello everyone,
Today we’ll talk a bit about photography. If you’re a photographer then are you really concerned about the equipment you use? If you are, what brand do you use? Canon? Nikon? Sony? Maybe something else that I’m missing here…
There are so many different manufactures on the market now that it’s hard to mention all of them here. Here’s another question for you:
If you use a camera, let’s say Canon or Nikon, do you use the original lenses or do you rely on the third-party lenses? I’ve used some lenses from Sigma in the past and I was very happy with the optical quality of the lenses. The built of the lenses was very good as well. What I wasn’t happy with was the auto focus, a bit too noisy and a bit slower than Ultrasonic from Canon. In terms of auto focus even the cheaper Canon lenses were better than Sigma Ex series (I’m not sure about HSM lenses, I haven’t tried them). As it comes to the quality of the optics, I found Sigma lenses equally good to Canon lenses (and cheaper).
In my opinion, it all comes down to what you expect from the equipment you use. Yo may be happy with the slower and a bit noisier auto focus and get a really good quality lens from third-party for a fraction of the price of the “branded” one. It is your decision and it depends on your expectations.
Welcome to the new week. Today we have a Bank Holiday here in Britain, but most of you folks do not so I decided to post something for you.
Today, I’ll point you to a great page and I’ll talk about Julieanne Kost.
You have heard about Julieanne before, she’s an Adobe Evangelist, or to be precise Senior Digital Adobe Evangelist, and that’s how most people know her. But she’s also a passionate photographer (that’s actually something we both have in common – I’m an Adobe Certified Expert – Web Specialist, but I’m also a passionate photographer, I have been into photography since High School). Not many people realise that Julieanne is a passionate photographer as well.
She spends most of her time traveling around the world spreading the word about Lightroom and Photoshop and many people wonder where she gets inspiration from. So today, I want to share with you an interview with Julieanne. So without further ado, let me give you a link:
Into the wild with Julieanne Kost.
Enjoy and see you back here tomorrow!
I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s post. Today, we’ll talk more about depth of field.
Let’s take it from the moment where I started talking about manipulating depth of field. There are three factors that define (or manipulate) depth of field:
Focal length is something you’ll find on every zoom lens, not just on an SLR camera but on compacts as well. When you zoom in or zoom out, you change the focal length. Focal length could be changed by pressing a button on a compact camera or by moving the ring on a lens on an SLR camera.
Aperture is a hole in a lens through which the light passes on its way to the camera sensor when the shutter opens (when you press the shutter button). Again, it could be a matter of using a button or a ring on a lens. The aperture is measured in F-stops – the smaller the F-stop the wider opening in the lens so the more light comes into the camera through the shutter. That’s why the lenses with smaller F-stops are much more expensive, i.e. if we compare standard 50mm lenses F1.4 lens is much more expensive than F1.8 or F2.0 lens.
Small aperture setting will also create shallow depth of field, that’s why lenses with small minimum aperture setting are invaluable in portrait photography. I’ll give you an example:
I use two lenses on a regular basis:
Zoom lens is great for overall photography, but when it comes to portraits, nothing can beat the prime lens with its F2.8. F2.8 gives me a fantastic shallow depth of field that I cannot achieve with the zoom (especially because the zoom goes to F5.6 at 40mm and more and for portraits you use longer focal lengths of 60mm and more).
Here’s an example of a photo taken with a shallow depth of field:
When setting an aperture, keep an eye on shutter speed. As you change the aperture, the shutter speed will change. As an example, when you change the aperture from F5.6 to F2.8 more light comes into the camera so the shutter speed will increase. Most photographers would use “Aperture Priority Mode” often displayed on the camera as AV mode. That’s what I use most of the time, because then I can focus on the depth of field and the camera will set the shutter speed automatically to adjust the amount of light coming into the camera.
That’s it for today. More information soon. Enjoy! 
Let’s start a new week with a photography post. This blog is not just about Photoshop and Lightroom, but photography as well.
I’ve been into photography for many years, my passion for photography started when I was in high school and it’s been a real passion for me since then.
So, what is depth of field, you may be asking? Depth of field is described as the are on the image that is in focus. As an example, if you take a photo of your friend in front of a building, depending in the aperture you use (more on that later), your depth of field may cover just your friend, or your friend and a building. If you take a photo of a landscape, usually the entire landscape would be in focus (a common aperture setting in landscapes would be 16 and more).
Here’s an example of a shallow depth of field:
And here’s an example of a depth of field that keeps everything in focus:
As you can see on the example of the landscape image, almost everything is in focus.
If you think about it, you can use depth of field to bring the focus into the image. Let’s say you’re taking a photo of a person – a portrait.
Would you like everything in focus, or would you like to have your subject in focus and the background blurred?
Usually you’d want the background to be blurred to keep attention on the model. That’s when you’d use a shallow depth of field. Using a shallow depth of field, you can seperate your subject from the background. When your subject is the only thing in focus, the viewer’s eyes will automatically focus on the subject and keep attention on it.
So, how do we manipulate the depth of field? We’ll talk about that tomorrow…
See you tomorrow. Have a lovely day.
Hello folks,
I have talked about HDR in the past, so today I just want to share with you an example of an image that I made into an HDR image. It’s just a regular photograph, outdoor photograph to be precise and I thought I would make it into a nice HDR image using Photoshop CS5.
Just to remind some of you who haven’t heard about HDR – it’s high dynamic range imaging and it is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods.
This image was tweaked using the new fantastic HDR Toning in Photoshop CS5. Great new feature with loads of interesting presets and options to tweak it.
I hope you like the effect. Let me know what you think. Enjoy!
Hello everyone!
Depth of filed relates to photography. It is a term describing the distance between the closest and furthest away object that appears to be in focus in an image.
And that’s one of the topics in this week’s Episode of Photoshop Lightroom TV. Sometimes, it is desirable to have all the objects within an image in focus, but in many cases it would be very difficult to achieve. That’s an example I used in this week’s episode – an image of an empty glass in the foreground with a beach in the background.
Note: The image is an image I received from Adobe. The copyright belongs to Adobe Systems Inc.
In the episode, I show you how to use two versions of the same image – one with the focus on the foreground, and another one with the focus on the background and blend them together to get everything in focus! Here are the two images I used:
And here’s the link to the Episode of Photoshop Lightroom TV so you can watch the tutorial:
Photoshop Lightroom TV – Episode 46.
I hope you’ll enjoy it!
Lightroom 3 brought a great and easy way to shoot tethered straight into Lightroom from your camera. How great is that?! And it is so easy and it requires no setup, no applications need to be installed. You can shoot “straight out of the box”!
Previous version of Lightroom allowed you to shoot tethered but with Lightroom 3 it became so simple. You just plug in your camera into your computer (you can use a usb cable that came with your camera or buy a long one or just use a wireless transmitter, there are a number of options) and then let Lightroom import images while you’re taking photographs! As simple as that!
I posted some more information about shooting tethered with Lightroom about a week ago so I am not going to bore you with all the details. Instead I invite you to watch the video I have created to show you how easy it is to shoot tethered with Lightroom 3.
Watch the video and enjoy it!
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