Roger Cicala
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How to Shoot With Wide Aperture Lenses
I’ll start by saying I’m a wide-aperture prime nut. I love them. No zoom, not even the best zoom, can compare. “Wait”, you say, “what about my $2,000 top grade f/2.8 Wonderzoom? People say it’s the best lens made.” I’ll grant you it might be as sharp as a prime, at least at its sweet spot it might.…
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The Seven Deadly Aberrations
# This article is aimed toward the gearheads among us, those who want to know more about how things work. Reading it will not improve your photography even a microscopic amount. Then again, it might, actually, at least a bit. But for those who are interested in such things it’s a fun read. And for…
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Lens Repair Data 4.0
What Is This? We started doing this several years ago. We have a unique opportunity: we own a very large number of lenses (5,600 have passed through our system) subjected to rather harsh conditions: they get packed in boxes, tossed around by UPS, and sometimes the user isn’t as careful with them as…
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FWIGTEW and Other First Wedding Acronyms
One of the enjoyable things about running Lensrentals is getting to work with lots of photographers who are taking their hobby professional and entering the field of wedding photography. We have many regular customers that we’ve worked with since they rented equipment for their first big shoot,…
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The Full Frame Move
I hear it all the time: I’m thinking about moving to a full-frame camera. It’s getting more common as the price gap between full and crop frame cameras is shrinking, at least to some degree. But often it said as if moving to full-frame is, by itself, an upgrade. As someone who moves back and forth…
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Lenses: Don’t Collect the Whole Set
> Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions. Author unknown This article is written for those people who not too long ago walked into (or more likely logged onto) a camera store and purchased their first digital SLR and a lens or two. It was 12 years ago for me, but I still…
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How Autofocus (Often) Works
Clarke’s Law: _Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic_. Arthur C. Clarke Clark’s Law: _Any sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice_. J. Porter Clark ## My Apologies Nothing in online forums demonstrates the two laws above better than…
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Everything but the Sharpness
About 614 times a day I take a phone call or answer an email that is essentially the same question: “How sharp is this lens?” It’s no different in online forums (ok, actually forums are a lot worse) where pages of arguments drone on comparing the results of this bench-test lab review, these MTF…
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The II Conundrum
_First, things first: this is simply an editorial. So there’s no worthwhile knowledge in this article, just my opinions._ A few years ago, when a new version of anything came out, here was the Lensrentals drill: 1. Buy the new version, anywhere at any price because we couldn’t possibly get enough.…
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How to Clean a Camera Sensor
We have a new YouTube video up, showing how Scott does a thorough sensor cleaning:
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“This Lens Is Soft” and Other Facts
# In 2008, I wrote an article This Lens is Soft, and Other Myths that pointed out that lenses and cameras all have tolerance ranges and sometimes a given lens can be sharp on one camera body, and soft on another. At the time, autofocus micro-adjustment was a fairly new feature on camera bodies and…
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A Broad Guide to Ultra Wide
A while back I wrote a blog on Getting Sharp Telephoto Images when I realized a lot of our renters were using big telephoto lenses for the first time and didn’t know the tricks it took to get good telephoto images. We also see people struggle at the opposite end of the focal length range: they know…
