4th session with Tisa

This time I ain't gonna bother you with text. This is the 4th session with her (out of 5 so far), I'll let the photos speak for themselves.





We had fun in the process

Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC HSM Review

This is the next in line of Sigma lenses that I've tested. And is so far my favourite (out of cca 12 lenses). Image quality is very impressive for an ultrawide lens - as most of you probably know, (ultra)wide lenses don't have a reputation of having great image sharpness. That's why I was even more impressed. At 10 mm it's a gem. Sharp wide open, both in the center and on the borders and very sharp when stopped down a bit (f5.6-8). I did most of the test shots on the 10 mm settings, because of the UWA perspective (you can do a lot of interesting, crazy things with it). Sharpness in the center is good across the whole range, however border sharpness drops a bit when you're "zooming" towards the long end. Some moderate vignetting and CA is visible at 10 mm, but in the 15-20 range it's only a minor issue. Again bare in mind that this is an UWA lens which usually have more aberrations etc. Barrel distortion is quite pronounced at 10 mm. Built quality is excellent. AF is very fast and silent (it has HSM), it has full time manual override, manual focus and zoom rings run smooth and are well damped. Filter size is 77 mm.

This lens is very usable for nature shots, panoramas, sports like snow&skateboarding (you can "blow" the skater into the sky, because of the UWA perspective), architecture and funny portraits (I messes around quite a bit with my friends). I can only highly recommend this lens to anyone who needs an UWA lens. The price is very good too.

Below are the samples taken with Canon 400D. The field of view when mounted on 400D, is equivalent to 16-32mm on a full frame camera. From the crops you can judge image sharpness (center and border) for yourself. All the samples have slo-foto.net watermark, don't get alert - I made the test for that site and I'm the author of the photos.


F6.3, 1/100, 10 mm, ISO 200





On the sample above you can see some CA




F6.3, 1/25, 20 mm, ISO 100




F5.6, 1/50, 20mm, ISO 100




F7.1, 1/30, 10 mm, ISO 100



F4, 1/13, 10 mm, ISO 800

Below you can see two examples of how UWA perspective can be used. Train appears to be infinitely long and the sky is also "stretched":


F6.3, 1/80, 10 mm, ISO 100




F8, 1/320, 10 mm, ISO 100


If you're interested in studio part of the test (resolution chart) it's available here . All the shots were taken by Sandi Pelko. All the paramaters were set to 0 (sharpness, saturation etc), mine (taken outside) were set to the standard picture styles (sharpness 3 (on a scale 0-7, where 3 is really a normal setting). So the studio shots may seem a bit softer.

Pros:
-sharpness
-fast&silent AF
-price
-built quality

Cons:
-vignetting at 10-15 mm
-border sharpness at 20 mm

HIGHLY RECOMENDED.

Hip hop party in Gala Hala

Yesterday I was on a hip hop party in Metelkova Mesto. It was crazy. DJs were rolling mostly good old-school rap. I was there with my boy DkleMan . DJ Ninja put us on her guest list and we returned her the favour, by making her a few photos. We almost missed her gig, because one of the DJs canceled, so she started a couple of hours earlier, so we managed to get only a few photos of her, without the time to set up the camera and flash unit properly. We are "noobs" when it comes to party photography and need a bit more time to get the settings right. When we got it right she already finished and DJ Supastar came on the stage. I took most of the shots with the kit lens 18-55 and flash unit Canon 430 EX on Canon 350D. I mounted Sigma 30 1.4 (which I'm currently testing) for a short period of time, but it wasn't wide enough.

On the first two photos you can see miss DJ Ninja, on the last three DJ Supastar:

Goldeneye

The star of this short post will be a kitten I named Goldeneye. After the Photoshop manipulation. He had green eyes, but I figured they looked a bit dull when I partially desaturated the image (it sounds kinda funny using the word partly, since only a percent of it is left in colours). I met him when I was wondering what to shoot in one of the most interesting towns in Slovenia, Izola (I wanted to do some architecture since it's pretty interesting, colourful mediterranean, but I'm not sure if I made a single shot of it). That was back in October 2005.

Slo-Foto.net shooting

On August 25th 2006 Slo-foto organised another shooting with pro models. Until this shooting, we (I'm a part of the Slo-foto team) only had various photo workshops. This time we decided that theory and mentorship were unnecessary and focused on the practical part only, since many experienced photographers don't care much about theory and they just want to have a session with good models. And it's cheaper too. A friend of mine attended the shooting and she was amazed by professional approach of the models, which made it easier for her to take photos (and make good photos), since she had no experience with model shooting. At the same time this was a chance for her to see other photographers at work, especially more experienced ones - we all know that the relationship between the model and the photographer is very important (if you want your photos to be good).

We began the shooting on Metelkova in Ljubljana, which offers many interesting places to shoot. Urban&alternative. Interesting. The second part of the shooting was supposed to take place in Ljubljana's main park, Tivoli. But we had to choose another location, because DJ Umek had a big event there at that day, so we decided to shoot the second part in the surroundings of Ljubljana's castle. The environment is pretty much the same as in Tivoli (nature and a castle). We intentionally picked contrasting locations (urban/nature and historical architecture), to offer the participants a variety of environments for photography.








The editor chose this one for the magazine cover:



Since I didn't have the time to make a complete coverage (I was busy holding reflectors etc and took a few shots myself since I needed a photo for the cover of ONA magazine), here's a link to Slo-foto forum, with more photos.

My dawgs

I dedicate this post to all my friends, which I often bothered with my camera. All of this photos are spontaneous snapshots. Shots were made in the last year and a half, using various cameras (from Canon 350D to Canon 1Ds mkII), all of them with fixed focal lenght lenses, 50 1.8 or 85 1.8 (besides the two with obvious UWA distortions).

Let's start with the best hairdresser in town:

My mean man Nikolaj:

Desperate for the first hit of nicotine that day:

Luc, the administrator of the best Slovenian photo site

. . . Alien?


. . . OG #1:



Cheese:

A short session with Sandra

In the beginning of December I was supposed to have a session with Sandra. Unfortunately I got sick the day before the session, so I had to cancel it. Because she planned on going to Ljubljana anyway and I really wanted to have a session with her (although I was still sick and wasn't feeling well), I called her and asked her if we can still do a short version of the session. A kind of a try out session, since she didn't prepare for it, because I had to cancel it (she didn't had the clothes for the session, no extra make up etc). So we had a 30 min session and this is the result:



We're planing a real session in the spring/summer, I'll make her book photos, so she can take on pro modeling.