All Posts
Shooting Outdoor Sports
Its getting to be Spring (at least in most of the country) and soon we’ll all be outside taking pictures. For a lot of people that’s going to include taking pictures the kid’s sporting events (or if you can afford the ticket prices, the professional sporting events). If you’re a professional…
Breaking Photographer’s Block
Its February. That awful part of the year when the parties are over, good light is rare (and even when there is good light, you think two or three times about going out in the cold), the world is colorless, even the models don’t want to pose ‘until they take off a few pounds’. And I’ve taken 7,632…
Street Shooting
by Stephen Michael Garey Street shooting is to photography what blues, jazz and rap are to music: It’s the soul side of picture taking, a recognized artform that strives to capture aspects of life that the average snapshot photographer might overlook or even avoid: real people living real life in…
Optimus Prime
Today’s topic is prime lenses, those lenses that (GASP!!!) don’t zoom! Wait, don’t leave. This is really worth your time. (OK, those of you who already shoot entirely or mostly with primes can leave, there’s probably not much for you here.) About 10 times a week, in discussing the best lens for the…
Teleconverters 101
The problem, I think, is that it seems so simple. “If I add a 2x teleconverter I’ll get that closeup shot I want.” We all know what a teleconverter’s purpose is: it magnifies the image by a factor of 1.4x or 2×. A 300mm lens with a 1.4x converter becomes a 420mm lens. With a 2x converter its a…
The Budget SLR Gourmet
This is a bit of a different perspective for us: I’m writing this article at the request of a number of our rental customers about what to BUY, not what to RENT. Fairly often one of our customers, beginning to get into photography, emails me with questions about getting quality gear on a budget.…
Canon’s Error 99: the Man, the Myth
_This article was updated in April of 2009 after Mark at Precision Camera, our favorite repair shop, provided us with some additional information._ This is probably the most boring article I’ve written for LensRentals. (Personally, I like Smashed Front Element the best.) But, I love a good mystery,…
What Lens Do I Want? Part I
This is the question with 1,000 answers. Or at least the question we answer 1,000 times a day. We stock 200 different lens models (as of December 2008), each of which is the right tool for some photographers some of the time. Sometimes the question is for subtle differences between specialty…
"This lens is soft" and other myths
One of the most common examples of anti-logic we see at LensRentals is the statement The lens is soft/front focuses/back focuses. Now don’t get me wrong, there are bad copies of lenses out there, as best we can tell ranging from 3% to 7% of lenses. And we know, despite our checkout procedures, that…
Night Photography
It’s getting to be that time of year where daylight photography is limited to holidays and weekends. A surprising number of photographers put up their gear until March or April, except for the routine indoor snapshots during the holidays. I’m always surprised at how many people aren’t comfortable…
Front Element Scratches
We had a chance to make a pretty fun demonstration today, and here it is. As most of you know, we’re very finicky about our gear. We don’t like even tiny scratches on front elements or dust in a lens (although a bit of that is inevitable). We’re like you. We want the lens to look as good as the…