I got a few followup questions from my friend after my response to his request for advice about baby photography, so I figured I might as well put my additional answers up here too:

Should I be taking the shot in B/W or converting it later?

I always shoot in color and convert in software later. That way you have both options. If you shoot in B&W in the camera then you are stuck with it. But if you shoot in RAW (rather than JPG) then it doesn’t matter. The preview on the back of the camera would be in B&W if you shoot in B&W mode (which can be helpful to visualize the image in B&W), but the actually file will have full color and you can do whatever you want with the file.

Lens Hood required with the 50mm?

I use hoods on all my lenses to help protect the lenses if I drop them. The hoods for the 50′s are so small that they don’t really help much for flare or reflections. You can get after-market hoods for most lenses from stores like DealExtreme.com for less than $10 (compared to 2 to 3 times as much for branded hoods from Canon and Nikon), so for me it’s a no-brainer.

I have the 580EX [flash], should I be leaving it at home? Or is bouncing flash of the ceiling OK to do in low light?

Nice flash! I carry my flashes with me all the time and I use them a lot. I pretty much only use them by bouncing off the walls or the ceiling (or off-camera in a Softbox). It’s a different look than ambient only, but if you’re careful with it then it can still look very good. I probably use a flash less with my 50 than with other lenses, but I still use it a lot. You may want to use it at the hospital, but they may not be very happy with you if you do. I would definitely take it so you have it if you need it! After you bring baby home then you will be shooting so much that you should experiment with flash and no-flash and see what you like.

A friend of mine recently asked for some advice on how to make some great images of his newborn baby.

“We’re having our first child in a couple of weeks and I just started a photography course. I’m looking for some tips on getting some decent shots. You being a Dad AND an accomplished shutterbug, I thought I might pick your brain a bit. It was suggested to me to pick up a 50mm 1.8 lens. I have a 40D which puts the lens at approx 80mm after crop factor. Obviously flash probably shouldn’t be used, so I was wondering if you could please toss a little guidance my way.”

I quickly came up with a few great tips that I wanted to share here too:

1. Consider Black and White, and use Tight Depth of Field - Brand new Babies are often blotchy and scaly and if you photograph them in color then they tend to look funny. Black and White images can hide lots of that stuff. So does a really large aperture and tight cropping. This is where a lens like the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 comes in. It is very inexpensive (around $100) and has a very wide maximum aperture that allows you to highlight a sweet spot of the scene, such as the eyes or the face of the baby. (I wouldn’t actually shoot it at 1.8 because the depth of field would be so narrow that much of the image would look blurry. If you use something like f/2.8 then you can really bring the attention to the part of the image that you want, while still giving yourself a chance of making the image in focus).
2. 
   Move Closer - When you think you’re close enough, take another step closer! A series of tightly cropped shots are often much better than trying to show everything in one image. And portrait where the subject almost completely fill the frame are almost always better than images where the subject is small in the frame. Having said that, make sure you shoot a little bit of everything, from really wide to very tight just to make sure you capture everything that you might want to remember later.
3. Shoot the Details – Baby hands and feet are really cute, so don’t forget to make some nice images of them. Make sure you also get a few shots of the hospital details that you will only see in the first few days. The birth announcement, the name card on the bassinet, the wrist band (security ID) on Baby’s arm or leg, etc. You might also want get a few images of the doctors, nurses, and any other people in the hospital that make your life better while you’re there. The key is to have a camera with you at all times for the first few days.
4. Use Window Light on a Cloudy Day - After the initial excitement of Baby’s arrival drops off, you’ll want to make some great portraits while the baby is still tiny. It’s still winter in our neck of the woods and we’ve had lots of those foggy days lately where the light coming in the window is extremely soft and bright white. This is fantastic light for portraits. Set baby up in a blanky (or in mom’s arms) near the window and use that light to your advantage. This is much easier than trying to make light from a flash look good because you can see what you’ve got before actually taking the picture. Try it, you’ll like it!

These are all great ways to make sure you get some great images of your baby and some of the details of her arrival.You’ll look back on these images many many times over the coming years, so you really should try to do it right!

A few more thoughts about 50mm lenses:

I love mine and I use it all the time. In fact I have two of them; an older 50 f/1.8 and a brand new Canon 50mm f/1.4. I really love the 1.4 version because it focuses extremely quickly and it’s incredibly sharp. The 1.8 is also very good (especially for the price), and I happily used it for years before upgrading, but it focuses really slowly, especially in low light. The good news is that really little babies don’t move very quickly so you can set up every shot very carefully and get your focus bang on! Either one of them make fantastic portrait lenses because the focal length is just right for making images that look pretty natural to the human eye (ie. it is very similar to what we see with our own eyes). But they also allow very tight DOF which lets you to blur out the distractions in the background. I definitely recommend buying one if you have the cash.

I’d love to hear what has worked well for you when making portraits of your children (or your clients children). Hit me in the comments below!

In the last installment of Quick Tips for Photographers we talked about Shooting the Moon. Well I’ve got another great tip for you to make even better images of the moon.

Make the Moon Look Really Big

Most people automatically shoot images of the moon with really wide angle lenses. The natural assumption is that a great Landscape image will look even better if it includes the moon. This is true, but the thing is, the moon is really far away and if you shoot it with a wide lens, it’s going to look really small. You’re far better to use the longest lens you’ve got. This will allow you to take advantage of a principle called Telephoto Compression; this is where distant objects appear to be closer, and larger, than they really are when they are magnified

So how do you make this work with the moon?

1. Figure out when you need to be at your chosen destination so that you see the Full Moon when it is near the horizon. I prefer to do this at sunrise or sunset so that the light of the moon is nicely balanced with the landscape around it. Note that for every Full Moon there will be at least 2, and sometimes 3, opportunities when the rising or setting moon coincides with the rising or setting sun. You can use TimeandDate.com to figure out when the next one will be.
2. Find a really scenic vista that you can see unobstructed from a long way away.
3. Back up a long way so that you can fill the frame appropriately with the main subject (other than the moon), and still have room to include the moon.
4. Arrive plenty early so you have time to get your gear set up in advance of the rising or setting moon, and so that you can change positions if you don’t have the moon perfectly aligned with your main subject.
5. Make plenty of images as the sun and the moon rise and set. The light will be perfect for only a few minutes for each opportunity.
6. Be prepared for the weather to totally bust you more often than not. I honestly try to make moon images almost every month, and in the last year I’ve only been successful 3 times. That’s just how it goes as a landscape shooter. Sometimes the weather cooperates, sometimes it doesn’t.

This is the next installment in my series of Quick Tips for photographers.

New photographers often get confused about terms like Wider Aperture, smaller F-stop, Stopping Down, and Opening Up. So here is a series of explanations for what some of these terms mean.

The thing is, photographers that know this stuff just know it, and they don’t even have to think about it. When a new person comes onto the scene and they hear terms like Stop Down, Open Up, Fast Glass, and Maximum Aperture, they often have no idea what language is being spoken. It’s really not obvious what any of these terms mean, and it can be very confusing to figure it out unless someone explains it clearly and simply.

Here are some key points to remember:

• A small F-stop means a large aperture.
• A large F-stop means a small aperture.
• Large apertures (small F-stops) let in more light than small apertures, so you can use faster shutter speeds to get the same exposure.
• “Stopping Down” means to use a smaller aperture, which is a higher F-stop.
• “Opening Up” means to use a larger aperture, which is a smaller F-stop.
• “Fast Glass” means using lenses with a very low f-stop (such as f/2.8 or smaller) which let in lots of light. More light means faster shutter speeds, hence the term Fast Glass. Fast glass is good.
• “Maximum Aperture” means the largest aperture, or smallest F-stop, that a lens is capable of. See “Fast Glass” to figure out why this is important.

This can be very hard to remember until you’ve used your camera so much that it just comes natural to you and you don’t even have to think about it. For many people, simply memorizing the table above will be enough to make this all work flawlessly!

More Detail for the Advanced Class

For some people it helps to think about what the numbers mean. If you don’t want to know, just stop right here, and go back and finish memorizing the terms above!

The F-stop is really just a ratio between the size of the lens opening (called the aperture) and the focal length of the lens you are using. The size of the aperture is simply the focal length divided by the F-stop number.

The important part is that no matter what lens you are using, if you divide the focal length by 4, you will get a larger number than if you divide by 16; this means that at f/4 you will have a much larger aperture than at f/16, and therefore the lens will let in much more light at f/4 than at f/16.

For example, if you are using a 100 mm lens:
- At f/4 the size of the aperture is 100/4 = 25 mm
- at f/16 the size of the aperture is 100/16 = 6.25 mm

You can see that the aperture at f/4 is significantly bigger than at f/16, and therefore the lens will let in way more light at a smaller F-stop.

I have long been a fan of the website The-Digital-Picture.com as a fantastic source for in useful review of Canon cameras, lenses, and accessories. The reviews presented are the perfect length to provide an great overview of the equipment, without requiring hours of reading to get the idea. Each review also provides a brief comparison to closely related equipment with a discussion of why the buyer might want to choose one over the other.

For example, Canon has three wide-angle zoom lenses that, on the surface, have very similar specifications (EF 16-35mm f/2.8L, EF 17-40mm f/4L, EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS, EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS); however, even though their focal length ranges are similar, these lenses are all extremely different have have very different target markets. The reviews for each of these lenses includes discussion about some (but not necessarily all) of the related lenses. This information is gold and it becomes very easy to narrow in on a couple of the lenses as the likely preferred options.

The site has recently been updated with a brand new Lens Specifications and Measurements comparison tool that allows you to directly compare lenses to easily see the differences in height, weight, diameter, and many other physical properties. In the past it has been very difficult to get this kind of information at all, never mind finding it in one place. Finding it usually required wading through multiple review sites, online retailers, and the Canon website.

If you are a Canon shooter and you haven’t been to The-Digital-Picture.com, you should go there right now!