Nick Miners Photography

It’s been said that you’re only 50mm away from becom­ing a bet­ter pho­to­grapher. Time was when pretty much any (film) SLR cam­era you bought had a 50mm lens strapped to the front, often with a max­imum aper­ture of f/1.8. The thing is, a 50mm lens is at the sweet spot where the image qual­ity to cost ratio is at its highest. How­ever these days, most kit lenses that ship with even the most expens­ive DSLRs are so poor that they are hardly worth both­er­ing with. Most people, though, are unaware of this, and con­tinue to use sub-​​standard glass and won­der why their pic­tures never look like how they remembered them.

I have attached here a selec­tion of my favour­ite shots taken with my trusty Sigma 50mm EX-​​DG Macro — a lens that cost me £200 and is as sharp as lenses that cost five times more.

I’m thor­oughly enjoy­ing get­ting to know the new cam­era, and in con­junc­tion with Sigma’s increas­ingly impress­ive 105mm EX-​​DG Macro I am get­ting some very pleas­ing res­ults. Here is a set of pic­tures taken at lunch time today at London’s fam­ous Bor­ough Mar­ket, a food mar­ket selling fresh, high-​​quality and expens­ive food. Every single pic­ture in this set was taken at ISO 3200, and the col­ours you see are just as the cam­era recor­ded them.

After return­ing from the shoot I had a mes­sage from Jac­obs that my new bat­tery grip had arrived. So, with today’s release of the Cam­era Raw update for OS X, I now have everything in place for a com­plete EOS 5D Mark II work­flow. All I need is to take some more pictures…