Zooming Ahead

I asked Birthday Claus for a telephoto zoom lens for my birthday, and got it! It’s for my Canon 350D, and is a Canon EFS 55-250mm with image stablizer. I don’t know very much about lenses but this looked as though it would extend what my camera can do, without breaking Birthday Claus’s bank (any more than it’s broken already, that is). All I’ve been using ever since I bought the Canon a while ago is the basic ‘kit lens’ (18-55mm).

The kit lens is actually fairly wide angle, isn’t it? You can cram a lot into one shot! I was trying to pull some leafy twigs out of the way of one timed shot (sideways on), and was way to the side, trying to melt into the tree (which was probably teeming with spiders and wasps)… but the camera still caught my shoulder. My interest is going more towards landscape now, away from cats and still life and things in the garden. I would really love a nice wide angle zoom lens but they seem to cost far more than the telephoto zooms.

Meanwhile the telephoto zoom does meet a need; I can get shots I wouldn’t have managed before. Clouds look much the same through zooms… though actually they look better in wide angle shots. This was probably taken at 55mm and then coloured up in Photoshop Elements — I can never resist!:

Below is Delilah… one of those cats who gets up and comes over to you if you approach too near with the camera. The zoom is a boon in these circumstances! She is keeping a wary eye on Cheeky, who is glowering at her from the background. Those two are like warring supermodels…

Something from the garden… that blue in the background really caught my attention; wouldn’t normally take a photo of the negative space between roses!

And Samson with his curly locks, sleeping like a baby.

You can take hand-held shots with this zoom because of the image stablizer. The close-up of Samson’s face was handheld indoors… I wouldn’t have been able to do that with my zoom on the old non-digital Nikon! A tripod was a must for that piece of kit.

Another thing I’m able to do that I wasn’t able to do with the Nikon’s zoom, is share the filters used by the basic lens. The Nikon’s basic lens took 55mm filters, and the zoom took 67mm filters. Both Canon lenses take 58mm filters, so I can use my new polarizing filter with either.

It’s a very light lens; doesn’t feel any heavier than the basic one, and I don’t notice that the camera is any more eager to overbalance on the tripod than it used to be!

Something does annoy me about the tripod itself; it’s an old one I used with the Nikon. It’s how the camera attaches to the tripod that vexes me… I don’t know if it has changed or improved in any way, but no matter how firmly I turn that screw, the camera works loose again. Taking ’sideways’ shots becomes a nightmare, with the camera eventually sagging. Maybe I should be looking at newer tripods to see if they handle that better, though the ones I’ve seen are so lightweight I don’t see that they’re any more stable than the one I have…. quite possibly less. Though it’s hardly the Rock of Gibraltar! I was taking some seascape shots the other day from a footpath, and the wind was so strong that it was causing the entire tripod to ‘thrum’. Some of the exposures were longer than they should have been, and I wasn’t surprised when I got home to find the pictures were less than sharp.

Such is life… and photography!