i went to a live seminar a few weeks ago on product photography. product photography is what i do 5 days a week at my great day job. the photographer was using a nikon d7000 with a 24-70mm 2.8 nikon lens. he stated that if you fill over 75% of the frame with the product to be shot...then you want the highest number fstop that your lens will do...such as f22...if you want everything in full focus. ok...makes sense, i thought.

he took some great product shots and had them printed there and passed them out. the shots were awesome. he was using 3 monostrobes.

so...today i am doing some product shots. i have 3 studio strobes. i set them up like he did. set the camera on iso100, f22 and shutter speed was 1/250. i even set the brightness of the strobes with a sekonic flash meter.

i have the 7d and the canon 24-70mm2.8 L glass, so i am similar to his setup. i have 3 strobes and they are set correctly with a flash meter......

i take the photos on a tripod with a remote shutter control. the photos are exposed correctly...but they have noise and are "soft".
now i don't usually take soft photos and product shots need to be sharp.....like i always take. the photos literally suck. the photos are really not usable for my caliber of product shots. and how did i get full of noise at iso100?? i get better at iso1600 at f5.6

i lowered the fstop to f8 and f10...the photos came out awesome...of course i had to dim the monostrobes to make the exposure proper.

so big question.......why at f22 did these photos come out soft? the only thing i can come up with is that my canon L lens is crap at f22. at f8 and f10 the shots are as sharp as anything out there.

i took shots of 23 different products and they all sucked at f22.

so, did this instructor really shoot at f22? if he did, he blew the canon equivalent right out of the ball field.

or is f22 a no no on a canon $1600 lens?

i would sure appreciate some discussion on this. for the first time, i am really disappointed in my gear.

i have been taking sharp product shots for the last 7 years soft is not an option.

i have never shot at f22 before.

thanks in advance.
jim

Hi Hogs Would appreciate any suggestions that you might have on shooting the Volcano from a helicopter. This is the Doors off helicopter so that will help I am sure wanted the evening flight but my time will be at 2:30 PM. I am wondering if I should use my 80-400 f4 to 5.6 or maybe my 70-200 will be fine as it is a 2.8. I am also going to have my 14-24 2.8 lens with me. This is the only time I will ever have to do this and as I have never taken photos from a helicopter need all the help I can find.
Thank you to any Hogs that respond to my Question.

I shoot a lot of panoramas... auto exposure, 24mm, HAND HELD, and use PS CS5 Photomerge. Fabulous results. One is shown here.

I am a novice landscape photographer and will be making my first attempt at shooting a panoramic 3-picture photo. I live in St Petersburg, FL and plan to use a downtown location on Tampa Bay. I will be using my Canon 30D and I have two Canon lenses: 17-85 and 28-135. I will use my tripod. Any shooting and/or editing suggestions? Can I use the "landscape" setting or should I shoot manual? It seems like it will be a very time consuming effort. I have an older version of Adobe Photoshop (Photo Elements 2 - don't yell at me for having such an old version....I only do basic editing and like it)........will this be a good enough editing tool? Or is there another piece of software recommendation that is very user friendly and will make it easier? Thanks to anyone who responds.

Linda / St Pete

Well... I have to differ on the Manfrotto ideas... I did pay about $500 on what seemed to be a pretty stout Manfrotto and and Ball Head. Nope. Coffee Nerves, and the camera shutter induces sympathetic vibrations in the tripod which last seconds. Maybe not that big a deal when shooting stills at 1/1000, but when things get slooow, like 2 minutes in DSLR video, for example, the coffee nerves are a marvel to watch settle down over the first few seconds, especially with big telephotos past 600mm, like a 600mm full frame on a DX 1.5x crop.

Gotta retrieve my loaned out Gitzo Tele Studex Giant, sadly no longer made, but apart from multi thousand dollar cine tripods, I doubt any of the "lets make it really light" tripods in the world could even begin to compare in basic tripod perfection and ruggedness. No coffee nerves.

Funny, I was looking at Really Right Stuff's top tripod just now, and it has a load rating of 50 pounds. Almost comical when I think of loading my old Gitzo with a few hundred pounds of jib and movie camera. You don't even think about it. Also, the 58 inch max height of the RRS top carbon fiber tripod is a little short of the 144 inch max height of the Gitzo.

Sometimes, we set the Gitzo at about 7 feet and put the jib on it, giving LOW (few inch lens height off the ground) and quite HIGH (over 12 feet) boom reaches. Stick that on a dolly...

All that said, I am considering that Really Right Stuff tripod. I have been searching for a decent lightweight solution.