 Originally Posted by Neil
Glad you like it. That shot is not cropped. I have cropped it removing top (her hat) and bottom (finger tips) so it's just her hands, head/face and the landscape angles, which seems to be the crux of the 'pleasing bit' if you get my meaning.
I was dangling flowers need the camera trying to get hand in the right place, and the right angles of the bank in the back ground.
Well, if that picture is not cropped that's great composition, at least to my eyes. I love the angle, how she's reaching for the camera, the placement of everything - even the slope of the background. Just looks great. 
Originally Posted by krakenslayer
Thanks Lou! Believe it or not, that 50mm 1.8 is the cheapest lens Canon currently makes, and can be picked up for about £70 or well under $100! The trade-off is that its field of view is fixed at 50mm (near the furthest zoom of the standard kit lens) with no zoom capability (so you sometimes have to do a bit of leg-zooming backwards to get your subject in shot), and the build quality of the housing is very plasticky, but the quality of the glass itself crushes pretty much any Canon-fit zoom lens under £500. It has great depth of field at lower-numbered f-stops, with creamy-blurred "bokeh" backgrounds and vibrant pin-sharp foregrounds. It handles deep focus really well too, with great low-light capability and amazing sharpness and colour reproduction across the board. I know I sound like a salesman, but I just love this lens - it's not often you get pro-quality optics at amateur prices, so it's probably the best bargain I have ever had (and we all know Scots love a bargain  )
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I know Nikon does a similar lens that's only slightly more expensive. I wonder if Pentax does something like it too. I know it's not wide-angle like you were looking for, but I highly recommend a 50mm prime if you can get one, especially since the prices make them almost disposable.
Hmm, interesting. It almost sounds like what Pentax does with some of their lenses. They will put out a, let's say, 50mm DA* f/2.4 lens. That one, since it has the "DA*" designation, means it's built like a brick shithouse (ie: it's ALL metal, including the bayonet mount and threading). However, they will also make the same lens and call it a "DA" lens (without the "*") - this designation means it's the exact same glass and design as the DA*, however, it's plastic as well as the threads and the bayonet mount. Works the same as the other, much more expensive 'metal' version, but it's just made out of plastic instead of metal. I also think there might be some "water resistant" tech in the DA* lenses that the DA's don't either.
I currently have that Pentax 35mm f/2.4 prime lens, which is a DA lens (ie: plastic, but the glass is the same as the high-end one) and it was fairly cheap. I got it new from a camera store just trying to ditch it and it ran about $80 USD. Not bad at all - but had that been the DA* version? Add a few hundred bucks to that price.
I'm sure there's cheaper alternatives to that f/1.8 I linked to - in fact, I know Pentax makes a f/1.8 cheaper, but I really, really want the widest angle lens with the fastest glass I can find. Mostly because I want a lens for doing fantastic landscapes - sometimes in very low light. As you can see from what I post picture-wise, I'm a lot more into landscapes than taking pictures of people. lol.
A 50mm lens would be nice, but here's the one issue I have with the Pentax: since it's sensor has a crop factor of 1.5x, that means that a 50mm lens would be the equivalent of a 75mm lens. I'm not a big fan of these "cropped sensors" that cause this, but until I can afford a full-frame camera... That's why I want that 35mm lens. It will still equate out to a 52.5mm with the sensor crop taken into account, but that's wider than a 50mm with the crop issue, and, I don't really want to go so wide as to get a fish-eye lens. I am, however, a fan of good prime lenses. Zooms are nice, but sometimes you really have to play with the aperture and the zoom to find their "sweet spot."
Ok, so here's an HDR shot I created from the Shepherdstown Bridge in West Virginia I took a few weeks ago. This is a shot of the view from the bridge, not the bridge itself. There is a train track bridge out there in the distance, but, notice the piers out there in the middle of the water? They used to be for a covered bridge - well, two of 'em actually:
Here's a quick bit of history:
Covered Bridge #1 at Shepherdstown
The Virginia and Maryland Bridge Company, owners of the Blackford Ferry that crossed the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, discontinued the ferry service in 1850 and built a 600 foot covered bridge in its place.¹ The bridge connected Shepherdstown, West Virginia (Virginia until the Civil War years) to the road leading to Sharpsburg, Maryland.
The first covered bridge at Shepherdstown was one of many victims of the Civil War. Confederate soldiers burned over a hundred wooden bridges and destoyed other bridges and railroad property from Point of Rocks to Cumberland, Maryland. After blowing up the railroad bridge across the Potomac at Harpers Ferry in June of 1861, General Stonewall Jackson's mission was to continue the destruction of all bridges north of Harpers Ferry. He sent a detachment to Shepherdstown and burned down the multi-spanned highway bridge.
Covered Bridge #2 at Shepherdstown
It wasn't until 1871 that a second bridge across the Potomac was built at Shepherdstown. John Wood built the bridge at the same location as the first. That one was destroyed in the great flood of 1889, the Johnstown flood, and was replaced by an iron bridge.
And here's another American Swallow Tail butterfly, but this one was captured in West Virginia this time:
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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Did you crop that picture at all, or just snap it and post it as-is? Regardless, my eyes love it.
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