Lessons: 16Length: 2.7 hours

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  • Overview
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1.1 Introduction

Welcome to What Every Photographer Should Know About Lenses! In this course, I'm going to teach you all about lenses—how they work, how to tell a good lens from a bad one, and the different kinds of lenses that work best in different situations.

We're going to get started by talking about what the course will cover, and why you should learn all about lenses. This is going to be a lot of fun, so check out this lesson and let's get learning!

1.1 Introduction

Hi my name is Dave Bode for Tuts Plus and thanks so much for checking out this course. If you're a photographer and you wanna know more about lenses, this is the course for you. You're gonna start by learning about focal length and field of view, because this is the most important aspect of any lens system. Next you're gonna learn about aperture. You're gonna find out what aperture does and the two main areas that aperture effects. Depth of field and diffraction. Next you're gonna learn about what makes a good lens by taking a look at a bad lens. There you're gonna learn about things like blurring, loss of contrast, chromatic aberration, barrel and pin cushion distortion and more. You're gonna learn about special lens features, things like image stabilization, optical glass coatings, and special focusing motors. Then you're gonna learn about several different specific classes of lenses, things like the standard zoom lens, a wide angle zoom lens, medium telephoto zoom lenses, and telephoto zoom lenses. You're gonna learn about super zoom lenses, and why these are probably the ultimate travel lens. Then we're gonna talk about prime lenses, and discuss the pros and cons of using a prime lens. Then you're gonna learn about one of my most favorite specialty prime lenses, a fisheye lens. You're also gonna learn a little bit about macro photography by checking out some lenses that have a macro feature. And you're gonna learn how we can take an ordinary lens and add an extension tube and turn that into a macro lens. Finally, we're gonna be taking a look at a few examples of how we can use focal length and field of view, combined with perspective to change the composition of our shots. We're gonna start by taking a look at how focal length and field of view has an affect on the human face. And we're gonna check out what that looks like over a wide range of focal lengths. Then we're gonna apply the same concept to shooting objects outside, where we have a little bit more room to be able to move around and recompose our images. Throughout the entire course, we're gonna be looking at different example photos for each one of those lens types, so you can get an idea of what those lenses are best suited for. We're gonna cover a tremendous amount in this course, we're gonna see how to create some really fantastic looking images and hopefully have some fun along the way. With that said, you're ready to get started. So make sure you check out the very next lesson, where you're gonna learn about focal length and field of view.

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