Near, Far, Wherever You Are

I originally started the previous post to talk about my new camera lenses, but spent too much time going on about how I ended up with the Canon Rebel T6 over one of the dozens of other cameras out there so I split the post up to talk about the body and lenses separately. So here’s the post I meant to write to show off some photos from my telephoto lens (since my ultra wide-angle lens was already featured in my Acadia and Upper Peninsula posts).

When I got the T6, it came bundled with a kit lens – the EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II.¹ If you mostly want a DSLR for snapshots of everyday life and travel, the kit lens is great. If you’re using an entry level DSLR to dip your toe into photography, it’s still good, especially for a kit lens, but you’ll eventually want a lens upgrade. I ended up shooting with the 18-55mm only for three and a half years, but then bought not one, but two lenses within six months of each other.

One of the things that you actually often lose out on when you first get a DSLR is zoom. While point and shoot cameras and phones can use digital zoom and other tricks to increase focal length, there are physical limitations to whatever lens you have on a DSLR. I like the T6 kit lens, and it’s chosen as the kit lens because it covers a useful range of focal lengths similar to what the human eye sees, but it’s not the sharpest, and I wanted to take pictures of squirrels and other things and have them appear larger than my thumbnail on my computer screen.

Mallard duck [250 mm, f/8, 1/160 s, ISO-1600]

However, I first picked up an ultra wide-angle lens over a telephoto lens because I was about to head to Acadia with my family and I figured I’d rather get better image quality for landscapes on that trip. Based on quality and price, Canon’s EF-S 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 IS STM³ lens is more or less the lens of choice for landscape photographers (with my lens mount) looking for a new lens after the kit lens. Honestly, I don’t use the 10 mm end that often because the perspective distortion is pretty severe, but it’s sometimes useful for shooting indoors. I do like the lens, and similarly to the 18-55mm, the minimum focusing distance is only a few inches in front of the lens so you can get really close to your subjects.

Tree [121 mm, f/5.6, 1/250 s, ISO-100]

As the fall went on, both Canon and Nikon essentially announced that they were shifting all new development to their mirrorless cameras, and Canon at least has been discontinuing many of their DSLR lenses. I still wanted a telephoto zoom lens, so when I saw a used EF-S 55-250mm f/4.5-5.6 IS STM for a reasonable price with an extra 10% off for Black Friday, I bought it.⁴ This lens is basically the telephoto equivalent of the 10-18mm, and I’ve enjoyed it so far, though I haven’t taken it on any big trips yet. The main drawback of this lens is its minimum focusing distance of close to 3 feet. After almost four years of being able to crawl right up to my subject, I’m not used to having to stand back a little. It’s fine for picking out details in landscapes, but I keep forgetting when I’m using it to magnify flowers and other nearby objects.

Moon (cropped) [250 mm, f/5.6, 1/320 s, ISO-400]

The 55-250mm lens is by no means a heavy⁵ lens, but I will say that switching from it to either of my other lenses makes the camera feel extra light. With my three lenses, I now have continuous focal lengths from 10-250 mm (10-18, 18-55, 55-250), with perhaps a slight dip in quality from 18-55 mm. I like the ultra wide/telephoto combination for landscape/nature photography to get overview and detail shots, but the 18-55 mm focal lengths are super useful for general purpose walking-down-the-street photography and indoors (e.g. museums, conservatories). I’m debating whether it’s worth picking up the STM version of the 18-55mm lens for the boost in image quality because I’ve seen it for less than a hundred dollars used, and I’d probably like to try out a “fast” (large aperture) prime lens (likely the EF 50mm f/1.8 STM, or maybe the EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM) at some point to see what that’s about, but for now I’m happy with what I’ve got.

¹I’ve broken this down in another post, but the lens is made for a Canon crop sensor² camera (EF-S), its zoom range is 18-55 mm, the maximum aperture varies from f/3.5 to f/5.6 depending on the focal length, the lens has image stabilization (IS), and it’s the second version (II) of the lens.

²Camera sensors are a whole other rabbit hole that I’ve fallen down, and I might put together a different post on them.

³STM stands for the Stepper Motor used to autofocus the lens, and it’s a faster and quieter upgrade over the DC motor used in the kit lens that I have.

⁴Both the 10-18mm and 55-250mm lenses were $300 MSRP. I got the 10-18mm new for that price (+tax) and the 55-250mm used for around $170 total. The 55-250mm is officially discontinued, and the 10-18mm might not be, but it’s probably on the way out.

⁵For comparison, a super telephoto that someone might be reasonably walking around with (so not Canon’s EF 1200mm f/5.6 L USM lens that’s almost 3 feet long, weighs more than 36 pounds, and costs over $100,000) might weigh around 10 pounds.

The Camera

In February of 2018, I switched from a point and shoot camera (the Fujifilm FinePix XP55) to a DSLR (the Canon Rebel T6). By that time, most people were using phones as their primary photographic device, but I was not for a couple reasons – 1) since my first cell phone in college, I’ve had non-flagship TracFone phones with terrible cameras [my current phone is the first one I’ve owned that even has a front camera (that I essentially never use)], and 2) I’m legitimately quite awful at phone photography, to the point where there’s about a 50% chance any given photo isn’t even in focus. From a technological perspective, the XP55 actually has specifications that are comparable to an average phone camera from around 2018, but the point and shoot market has since been more or less obliterated by phones.

Icy grass [117 mm, f/8, 1/160 s, ISO-400]

Since I’m apparently not capable of getting good phone photos, I was still using a dedicated camera in 2018. After getting increasingly dissatisfied with the XP55, I upgraded to a DSLR. At the time, I knew that Canon and Nikon were two of the major names in the DSLR market and that the Canon Rebel series was frequently recommended for good entry level cameras. When I started shopping around online, the Canon Rebel T5 had been superseded by the T6 for close to two years and was getting harder to find. The T7 was, it turns out, weeks from being announced, and I didn’t know that I’d want any of the features (e.g. more megapixels and autofocus points) that made the T6i more expensive, so I ended up with the relatively affordable T6.

Squirrel [157 mm, f/5.6, 1/160 s, ISO-800]

Broadly speaking, a larger camera sensor tends to improve the overall “image quality,” increasing sharpness, how much you can crop or enlarge a photo, and low light performance. Going from the XP55 to the T6 increased my available sensor area by over an order of magnitude, so that was an immediate upgrade, even if I had stuck the T6 in auto mode and left it there. I was, however, also interested in learning about having control over aperture, shutter speed, and other settings, so I spent some time with photography books and dragging my camera a lot of places with me.

Trumpeter swans + ducks [121 mm, f/9, 1/160 s, ISO-400]

I’ve now had my T6 for just over four years, and taken close to 12,000 photos with it. My camera’s ridden with me on Amtrak to Chicago (twice), flown to Houston for the Society of Rheology annual meeting, gone to see family in Singapore, been dragged to Orlando for AIChE, visited Acadia, taken a trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and gotten biked all across and around Ann Arbor. As of late, most of the big players in the field are focusing their development on mirrorless cameras, but I’m still a fan of this entry level DSLR. I paid $330 for it new with the kit lens, so it’s not so expensive that you have to worry about every bump and scrape, but it’s still a nicely built piece of equipment that has plenty of capability, though not all the bells and whistles of a flagship camera.

The T6 doesn’t have in-body image stabilization, though all the lenses I have do. The general rule of thumb is to keep shutter speed faster than the inverse of the focal length, which I find works fine to get acceptably sharp photos, especially with my lenses rated for 3-4 stops¹ of image stabilization. The T6 also isn’t weather sealed, so I wouldn’t put it in a puddle or go out in a downpour, but it’s been fine in light to moderate rain and snow as well as cold. It further lacks a touchscreen, a tilt-out screen, and a live histogram (though does have live view, which I use on occasion), but I’ve never had any of those features so I’m fine without them.

The T6 has a bunch of photo modes, but I used auto for about one night to try out the camera, then it’s been in manual since then, and I’ve never taken video with it. I also don’t use burst mode, which is important for sports/action shots. I prefer shooting in full manual mode, but I use it very similarly to aperture priority a lot of the time, and I’m currently in a months-long trial of back button focusing², which I think I like. Although above around ISO-800, the noise starts being not great in certain situations, it’s a huge improvement over my point and shoot, so I’m not complaining too much. Overall, I’m very happy with the T6. It’s not the most brilliant camera out there³, and sure, I’d like to have the latest and greatest equipment, but the T6 is a more than capable camera for my adventures, and I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far.

[This post features photos from my newest telephoto lens. I also have a new-ish ultra wide-angle lens, which a lot of the photos from my Acadia and Upper Peninsula trips were taken with.]

¹Camera stops are a measurement of how much light the camera is seeing. One stop is half or twice as much light as the stop lower or higher than it. You get more stops of light by opening up the aperture, lengthening shutter speed, or increasing ISO. Image stabilization helps to eliminate blur caused by motion of the camera, which allows the shutter speed to be increased.

²Instead of half pressing the shutter to (auto) focus, you focus using a separate button on the back of the camera (hence back button focus). This decouples the actions of focusing and taking the picture, which allows you to set the focus where you want it, compose your photo, then take the shot instead of constantly having to refocus, assuming the focus point isn’t changing.

³It’s maybe just a little short on megapixels compared to newer cameras, and the lenses often aren’t the sharpest in the world, but since most people apparently only look at photos while scrolling through Instagram on their phone, no big deal, right?

Project Recap [Monarch butterfly]

Next up on the cross stitch project list was a smaller pattern with a short list of colors, another request from a Cornell friend. There were 7 colors total, 2 of which were black (310) and white (blanc) that I already had, and I picked up the remaining 5 colors for this monarch butterfly by Gentle Feather (Etsy) during my Michaels field trip.

Monarch butterfly

I stitched the pattern on 14 count light blue Aida leftover from my turtle and whale. At its widest and tallest, it’s 87 stitches by 61 stitches, or 6.2” x 4.35”. Mine turned out 6.25” wide and 4.25” tall (before washing), so every project I’ve checked has had its dimensions be somewhat off. At this point, I’m not sure if the Aida is very slightly off or if I stitch in a slightly uneven way that distorts the Aida. Anyway, the circumscribing rectangle contains over 5,300 stitches, but the pattern wasn’t full coverage and I’d estimate the actual stitch count to be closer to ~3,500 stitches. Time to completion was about three weeks, for an average of a little over 160 stitches per day, but this was done during my most intensive thesis writing phase so I was stitching less consistently.

Out of all the patterns I’ve done so far, I think this one had the most jumping around between colors and could have benefited from gridding, which I did not do. I completed the black and brown outlines of the wings first and then filled in the rest of the colors from dark to light. I did end up skipping a square on the right wing that I eventually discovered when the wing didn’t meet up correctly with the center section, but I blame that on stitching while simultaneously waiting for/arguing with my internet connection when I was trying to watch Cornell Thanksgiving weekend hockey (I eventually had to give up on the Wi-Fi and go sit next to the router with an ethernet cable plugged in). Because of the symmetry of this pattern, I did go back and do a lot of unstitching and restitching to get the wing outline correct instead of trying to adapt the rest of the pattern to a missing column.

Unfortunately, this pattern was not the most well designed. (Also note that it’s not perfectly symmetrical, but that may not be a major concern to anyone but your friendly neighborhood lepidopterist.) There was no one page version, which is fine since people stitching from electronic devices is a fairly recent development, but the two page version doesn’t have any overlap squares (usually shaded in grey to help transitioning between pages), making it difficult, particularly if you haven’t gridded, to move between pages if you don’t want to cut off your stitching right at the page line. I had printed the black and white version of the pattern to bring along on my Upper Peninsula trip in case I needed something nonelectronic to do, and I ended up taping it together and using it as an additional reference while also consulting a pdf in color.

The color pdf was okay to read, but symbol choices made the black and white version harder to read than it could have been. Although there were only 7 colors, 4 of the symbols were triangles, including right triangles in the bottom right and bottom left corners, one of which could be shaded or unshaded (see the symbol key below), and the two unshaded triangles were often right next to each other. I’ve also heard that darker colors should have symbols with heavier visual weights. This pattern had black as an unshaded diamond and white as a solid triangle. Admittedly, my stitching style caused some of the difficulties with the 2 page pattern, and the symbol problem was mostly solved by using the color version. In the end, I like the final result, and I definitely wouldn’t blacklist this designer or anything else that extreme, but depending on the complexity of the pattern, I might look for other options.

Symbol key