Category: How To's
-
The Sky is Falling and the Light is Leaking: the A7r Anti-Massacree
Anti-Massacree – A humorous anti-war movement from the 1960s, suggested in the Arlo Guthrie song Alice’s Restaurant. The song, like many of my posts, was criticized for being overly long. Believe it or not, I’m mostly a lurker in online forums. I read the hysteria of the day mostly for my own…
-
Why You Can’t Optically Test Your Lens with Autofocus
By far the most common email and PM I get basically says, “I think my lens is optically out of sorts. What do you think?” The second most common is, “So what’s the best way to optically test my lens without a ton of equipment.” Years ago I wrote an overly long post about testing lenses, but it was…
-
A Few Easy Lens Dustings
I get asked about 15 times a week, “How can I get the dust out of my lens?” The right answer is you don’t. All lenses have dust in them and it doesn’t affect the images at all 99% of the time. Even if you clean it all out, it will be back after you use the lens a few times. There are occasionally…
-
Zeiss 15mm Hood Removal
This isn’t a general interest post. It’s simply answering a request for some people who want to remove the hood from their Zeiss 15mm lenses so they can cut the petals off and use filter holders. Obvious disclaimer applies – doing this voids every kind of warranty, is probably a bad idea, and we…
-
A Tilted Element Demonstration
One thing we preach here a lot is that just because a dropped lens looks fine on the outside doesn’t mean it is fine. The other thing we preach a lot is that a tiny difference in the centering, tilt or placement of a single element can have a dramatic effect on image quality. Aaron made a great…
-
Guest Blogger Aaron Nace | How to Capture the Real & Surreal with a Superlative Lens
_Today’s Guest Blogger Aaron Nace is going to show you tips on creating and compositing fantastical images with a lens he considers to be one of the best._ _Aaron is a Chicago-based photographer and retoucher who combines elements of reality and fantasy to create his images. Aaron has taught…
-
The Care and Feeding of Your Tripod
Being a good photographer, you have a tripod. Maybe two tripods. Maybe even a big, heavy duty one for your big lenses, a standard one for everyday use, and one of those small, cool ones that folds up like a road map and you can carry it in your back pocket. Wait, I just realized 50% of the people…
-
Testing for a Decentered Lens: an Old Technique Gets a Makeover
## What is Decentering and What Does it Do? Strictly speaking, decentering would involve one or more of the lens elements being off of the central axis of the lens. This would prevent the curved surfaces of the lens from bending the light properly. In severe cases it could result in halos or…
-
How to Change your Camera’s LCD Cover
Inevitably, over time the plastic LCD cover on the back of your camera gets scratched, scuffed and generally ends up looking older than the camera really is. Most of the time it doesn’t matter much, you can see the images and menus just fine. But given enough scratches light glare may interfere…
-
The Lensrentals Lens Cleaning Methods
There are some articles I try hard to avoid writing. Politics, religion, the so-called benefits of UV filters and other things that get Fanboys riled up I avoid like the plague. So for two years, while people have asked over-and-over for me to write an article on how we clean lenses, I’ve politely…
-
How to Test a Lens
If you read my articles very often, you may have realized I’m not one to let a lack of knowledge prevent me from writing on a topic. First-hand knowledge I mean. I write a lot of articles that I may spend 6 weeks researching before I feel knowledgeable enough to start writing. But this is one topic…
-
How to Clean a Camera Sensor
We have a new YouTube video up, showing how Scott does a thorough sensor cleaning: