Just to show what Flash bouncing does for your pictures, here is a comparison of the same pose taken with two lighting setups. The one on the left is with the speedlite directly ahead in the models face (notice the long shadows) and the second one is at a 45 degree angle and bounced from the ceiling. Now there is a fill-in of the dark shadows and the image looks a lot less gloomy.
I’ve been trying to get a good picture og this squirrel in Planckendael for months now. it’s in the asian part of the park, in the indoor section behind glass and it’s darker on the inside than on the outside so the reflections play hell with the focus. I tried a polarising filter last time, but that didn’t help much. This time, the sun wasn’t as bright and it was early morning. This resulted in the following picture:
It’s springtime, so time to get out more, which invariably results in… Time for a new Canon upgrade to try out. For less than a hundred euro, there is the lensbaby lens. It’s available for different camera systems and basically it comes down to the kind of lens you see in ancient photographer pictures. Lens at the front with manual diafragma, black expandable bit behind it to get the focus right and a fitting to attach it to the camera.
The system is very cheap (I paid about 80 euro for it) and it offers some feautres no other lens can.
Here are some examples I took with the lensbaby. Note the glowing effect which accompanies the dreamlike pictures.
Onlangs mijn nieuwe Canon 55-250 IS lens toegekregen van bij foto konijnenberg (ze zijn toch altijd een pak goedkoper dan andere fotowinkels en je kan er goed advies krijgen als je de tijd hebt om tot daar te rijden) Maar deze keer denk ik toch dat ze hun winkelmagazijn eens op knaagdieren moeten doorzoeken want er heeft er eentje een stuk van mijn verpakking afgehaald. Gelukkig zat ie verder goed in de luchtzakjes ingepakt.
As you might have gathered, I like meddling in digital photography. There are however a number of printed foto’s from before I had my digital camera (not to mention the things our daughter will draw someday) which I would like to digitize. Unfortunately, the HP scanjet 4P which I used before has only got an SCSI interface and I use laptops these days. So I set out to look for a cheap scanner with USB access. After comparing websites and stores, I stumbled upon the Canon CanoScan Lide 25. For about €50 this scanner offers everything the occasional user needs. It’s very slim (about 1 cm), about as large as a sheet of paper, uses leds instead of fluorescent light and it can be powered from the USB port, so there is no need for an external power adapter. This is especially handy when using a laptop. On the downside, it’s not very fast and the quality is limited when scanning in high resolution.
To illustrate the quality I scanned a picture and then made a picture of the original with the Canon eos 350D with EF-S 60 macro lens.
The full face in original size: (100 dpi)
The Canoscan Lide (600 dpi) (right eye)
The Canon eos digital camera: (left eye)
Let’s try some comparison shots of the different flash possibilities using an external flash. In this case it’s once again my budget friendly Metz-36 which is being used for the testshots. The subject is my daughters pink Automoblox and the lens used is the Canon EF 28-135 IS with an Eos 350d body in a room with a single fluorescent lightsource.
The first shot is done by using no flash and a long exposure time (0,8 seconds) which would result in camera shake, but the image stabiliser offers good compensation for this. The picture comes uit quite orange with automatic white balance but a has a warm feel to it.
The second shot was made by using the internal flash. The white balnce is more correct as you can see by the white background this time. The exposure time is only 1/60th of a second and the picture is sharper than the one with long exposure. As you can also see from the picture, the flash does not quite make it to the background which remains pretty dark.
The external flash is clearly more powerful as the background is a lot lighter than in the previous picture. The flash is almost too bright for the subject and it looks a lot harsher. Ideally, flash exposure compensation would have to be set so that the flash cuts off the light a bit sooner.
Now the flash head is turned 45 degrees so that part of the light shines directly on the subject and part of the light is bounced from the ceiling. The picture looks a bit softer since the harsh flash shadows are suppressed. Still, the flash makes the pink windows look less intensly colored.
Finally, we bounce the flash completely from the ceiling. This is an image we’re used to seeing as the sun usually shines on our subjects from above. The pink windows have a darker, richer color whilst at the same time, the wood has a lighter color and the rubber tires have a greater brightness range going from light at the top to dark at the bottom.
This is what you get when playing around with the Metz 36 AF-4C flash in a dark room whilst keeping your camera lens open for about five to ten seconds. I just performed random actions before the lens and fired the flash several times.
Update 15-11-2008: After less than a year of usage, the flash has broken down twice. I was able to repair it the first time, but the inside is really low quality wiring. The second time, it had drawn my battereies empty within minutes and a burned smell came from the inside, so I decided to throw it away and replace it with the genuine Canon article. lesson learned here, cheap equipment can be more expensive in the long run.
A cheap way to add the extra functions of external flash to your canon camera is the Metz 36 AF-4C flash. These are available for under €100 (In comparison, the canon speedlite flash range starts at €300). The Metz flash is very basic in design, but with good functionality.
One of the cheapest lenses available for the Canon reflex system is the 50mm F1.8. At under €100 this lens offers great light throughput (In fact, it looks almost more like a magnifying glass than a lens).
The mechanics inside are not the most up to date and the lens will make a lot of noise when focusing. Focus lock is reasonably fast, but no distance window or full-time manual focusing is possible.
A manual switch has to be used to change from autofocus to manual focus. if you try to focus without having switched to manual, you’ll hear a horrible grinding of gears (trust me on this, it’s not a sound you want to hear ever again) The manual focus ring is tiny and you’ll find yourself setting the lens to autofocus because manual is simply too much hassle. 
It’s a fixed-focus lens so there aren’t too many mechanical bits inside and no zooming is possible, but it’s very light and very sharp, even towards the corners of the image (the classical weakness for most non-L lenses) There are five blades for the iris, which results in a somewhat pentagonal shape of the out of focus items instead of a round shape.
This is where this cheap lens truly shines out. No other Canon lens offers this much light for this little money. With F1.8, it’s easy to throw the background out of focus at a very short distance. Note the rose below where the leaves are already out of focus while the petals are sharp. This lens needs little light and is very good at indoor photography without flash or outdoor photography at short shutter speed for fast-moving objects. portraits are another excellent choice for this lens as the subjects face is very sharp, while the otherwise distracting background becomes a mere collection of vague shapes and colors.
