» Expert Photography

Introduction

Having the best gear in the world is never going to make you an awesome photographer, but there is gear out there that will make your job easier and help to produce better results and improve your photography – that’s what this list is all about. I can personally recommend everything on this list. All links take you to Amazon US.

It may seem unusual that a stabilised lens would improve your photography, but I assure you, your photos will come out a lot sharper as the stabilisation with help to counteract any movement in your hands when you’re taking shots at a slower shutter speed. The stabilisation on this particular lens will keep the photos steady for 3 further stops, which effectively means that you could shoot at the same shutter speed you would be using at f/1.4, while you’re shooting on f/4 – a huge difference.

10 Accessories To Improve Your Photography

Tripods are particularly useful when you’re shooting in low light conditions at longer exposures as perching your camera on a wall is really no substitue. A solid tripod will adapt to any situation that you throw at it, and will allow you to play around with longer shutter speeds. You can find lightweight tripods like this Aluminum-Magnesium-Titanium alloy one, which will absorb movements on the ground, while still remain stable as you weigh it down with your bag to prevent movement from the wind and your hands. The added functionality of the ball head allows you do change the position of your camera with ease into any rotation you could imagine.

This is one of the most important purchases for you to buy when you get your new camera as it can become incredibly adaptable to create the sort of light that you’re not used to from a flash. Buying the actual flash unit is just the beginning, you can then play around with fill flash and slow sync flash and start to modify the light with different diffusers and gels. This is probably in the top 2 accessories I recommend every digital SLR users buy on the day they buy their camera. If you use it properly, you can’t even tell that a flash has been used.

This takes the flash mentioned above and adds a whole range of posibility to it. By using this transmitter, you can take the flash off the camera and still be able to trigger it wirelessly with all of the in-camera controls that you had before. Not only does a flash look way better when it’s off camera, but it also opens up the opportunity to mount the flash behind much bigger lighting modifiers than just a diffusion cup. If ever I’m out taking photos with a model, I never mount the flash on my camera, even if I don’t have a stand with me and have to hold it, it’s still worth it.

I recently bought a beauty dish and for the price, the results are spectacular, and the addition of the honeycomb grid on the front improves the photos even further. A beauty dish sends out indirect light which is bounced around the dish before illuminating the subject. The grid that goes in front takes this soft light and forces the light through the holes in the front into a straight line and over my subject. Have a look at this photo below, it was taken using a beauty dish and a grid; look how natural the light looks and the soft shadows that appear on the face.

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This has similar uses to an off camera flash, only it’s a lot cheaper and less adaptable, but more natural looking. When the main source of light is behind or to the side of the subject, a great way to create the fill in light is to use a reflector to bounce some of the light back onto the subject. The main advantages of this is that it’s cheap and doesn’t have the look of being shot with a flash, which is quite common these days. This particular reflector folds up nice and small and has 5 different colours for you to play with.

Again, this is another accessory for your flash, but it’s cheap and it makes a big difference so there’s no reason not to buy one. You can effectively change the colour of the light that your flash puts out with these gels to either suit the ambient lighting that you’re in, or for creative effect. Bare flash can be a little bit garish, so it helps to change the colour to suit the lighting where possible. If you have one, put a diffuser cap on the end of flash too, that way the light will look a lot more natural.

Lighting stands take a lot of the added stress out of using an off camera flash on a photo shoot because you no longer have to worry about holding the flash or putting it down somewhere that it’ll illuminates your subject well. They’re pretty cheap for what they do, but make sure you buy a hotshoe adapter for top and a sandbag to weigh it down at the bottom. You may wonder how a stand will help improve your photography, but I assure you, when you can stop wasting your time worrying about different aspects of your gear, it opens up your mind to think about more creative, photographic options.

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This simple little accessory is the key to making sure you get accurate colours in your photos every time you take them. Make sure you’re shooting in RAW and take a photo of a grey card in each lighting situation and you can use the colour picker in your post production software to pick out the neutral grey and use that to set the white balance accurately. I personally own this exact same set in the UK and I carry it around my neck when I’m on a job and get my model to hold it for me so that I can set it later.

Gear 10230 10 Accessories To Improve Your Photography

Polarizing filters are great and essential for most photographers. To see what exactly they do, have a look at this article here. Remember to make sure you’re getting the right size for your lens and that you’re buying a circular (as apposed to linear) filter for a digital camera. Linear polarizing filters confuse the autofocus on modern cameras. The filter will remove glare and make your photos a lot more vibrant in bright daylight. I’ve linked to the one I use because I use a very good quality lens, and I always recommend you buy the best one you can afford because there’s no point spending good money on a lens and then putting some cheap glass in front of it.

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There are many reasons to shoot on film rather then digital, and this post is all about those reasons. By the time you're done reading, the question we no longer be, 'should I shoot film?', it'll be 'shall I bring my film camera or my digital camera with me today?'. Here's what shooting on film does for you…

Helps you Learn the Basics

The great thing about film cameras (especially the older ones) is that it forces you to learn what each part of the camera does before you can even take a photo. This is something that many amateur photographers overlook when they first get their camera; they've seen what it can do, they just want to start taking photos. This often results in the camera being left in full auto mode or a preset, when with just a few clicks of the dial, they can learn to take much better photos.

When you choose a roll of film to put in your camera, you're effectively setting the ISO speed as you can't change the film until you're finished. That leaves just the shutter speed and aperture to play with, and when you take photography back to basics like that, you'll soon start to learn how exposure works, and how to best use it to your advantage. If you're a kinesthetic learner like me, you'll find using film cameras a much better way to learn about photography.

It Helps to Hone your Skill

We're all guilty of getting a little bit snap happy with our cameras in the past and taking loads of useless photos of nothing in particular, just because we can. Well, that's not really an option with film (unless you've got more money then sense) because you can't just take a bunch of photos and transfer them to your computer, you have to actually think before you take a photo – it can't just be of anything. This added pressure of not wanting to waste money on film and developing means that you become a much more careful photographer and you consider how else you might take the photo before you actually take it. Think twice, shoot once.

Mistakes can get pretty expensive if you're not sure what you're doing with your film camera so this forces you to learn quickly about what you're doing wrong. There will be times when you go to take your camera out, adjust the aperture and shutter speed, and then manually focus and end up missing the shot. This is ok though as it's all part of the process and you'll soon get faster and better with your camera which will transfer over to your skills on a digital camera. Don't worry about missing a photo, we all do it, chances are if you wait a little bit you'll get an even better photo.

Cheaper

The cost of second hand, top quality, film cameras has gone way down since the advent of cheap DSLRs, making now a great time to get into film photography. Just because a lens doesn't autofocus or fit onto a modern day camera, doesn't mean it's no good, infact, one of the best lenses I have is a cheap 50mm f/1.7 that fits onto my Minolta with a bayonet mount. Old prime lenses without autofocus have very few elements to worry about, meaning that that the overall quality is better.

Another great advantage is that you can get a 'full frame' camera for less, meaning that you get the most out of any full frame lenses you may have. I'm a Canon shooter and all their EF lenses from 1987 and onwards all fit on both their EOS digital and film cameras. What this means to me is that I can spend money on a lens and still be able to use it on my film camera, in full frame. I won't go into too much detail about full frame cameras, i'll just link to this post, but what I will say though is that modern digital full frame sensors are called full frame because they're the size of a 35mm piece of film. If you don't have a full frame camera, using film is a great way of seeing what you're missing and a different perspective.

Better Quality

The first thing I noticed when I got into film photography was the difference in quality – it was almost shocking. A camera's sensor is just an expensive imitation of the roll of film, and it has in no way caught up with technology decades older then it. Not only that, but a camera's sensor is limited to a number of pixels that's built into it, where as a roll of film is only restricted by the quality of the scanner that captures it – usually much higher. Remember, you can still get digital copies of your photos when you go and get them developed. All of that aside though, I just find photos shot on film to be sharper.

Better Colour

The colour of the photos produced are much better then on digital as a roll of film doesn't have the restrictions that a sensor has. Not only that, but you don't have to worry about pesky white balance nearly as much when you're shooting on film. Have a look at the photo below, this is one of my favourite photos because of how well it captures the purple, red, blue and brown without losing any detail. This was shot on my Minolta SRT 101 from the 1960's.

Better Dynamic Range

Another thing I noticed when shooting on film was that I could shoot in conditions that I wouldn't normally be able to and still get good result. This came from the dynamic range of the film that I was shooting on and if you have a look at the photo below, you'll see trees that would normally have been silhouettes if I had shot on digital, now had much more detail on them.

More Sensitive

In general, I find that film to be much more sensitive and handle grain much better then any digital camera i've used. Have a look at the photo below and you'll see even though there is noise, it's a uniform colour and it's much smoother. The speed I shot on was ASA 200 and provided excellent results for the conditions I was shooting in. This photo is also another great example of how the dynamic range is better with film; there's no way my camera's sensor would have handled that shot as well.

Physical Photos

You can shoot all day long on digital, but it doesn't really mean much if you end up looking at them once and putting them on the computer. It's great to have physical copies of photos that you can frame and hang around the house to be seen, the way photos were supposed to be handled.

What to Watch out for

No matter how much I rant and rave about film photography, it's still a dated technology, so you will still end up having to buy second hand. Find a good secondhand retailer nearby and you won't have too many problems as they know how to check the cameras before they sell them and will guarantee anything they sell. That being said though, make sure you check the camera yourself, because you can't retake holiday photos that don't come out. I once bought a camera and took it on holiday with me and it wasn't until I got home and got the photos developed that I found that the shutter wasn't going up fast enough and ruining my exposures. I got it replaced without hassle for a better camera, but the damage was done.

If you buy a range finder as apposed to an SLR, you will leave your lens cap on for a few photos here and there – that's just a fact, i've done it many times. You become so used to being able to see your photos framed through a viewfinder, that you forget that a viewfinder is not connected to a lens on a rangefinder camera.

Something a little bit rarer then the above is light leaks which are usually found on much older cameras for a variety of reasons. In my photo below, I was using an old Olympus Pen (which used to shoot 2 shots to every frame), and the tripod mount fitting had falled out of the bottom of my camera and was allowing loads of light in, ruining the center of each exposure. There's lots of lessons to be learnt when shooting on film, but the results are still worth it.