Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM Lens Sample Pictures

Beach trees in their fall colors appear to blaze over the dark, rain-soaked rocks around Shawnee Falls in Ricketts Glen State Park, near Benton, PA. This was a perfect situation for the B+W 82mm XS-Pro MRC Nano Kaeseman CP Filter I was reviewing.

In this picture, the Milky Way is reflected in Island Pond in the North Maine Woods as a pair of ... satellites streak through the night sky.
 
Island Pond is in the Deboullie public area of T15-R9 in northern Maine. This location is a 1 hour drive from the grid and from paved roads. Along with natural beauty, what you get here is a dark sky.
 
The Milkway itself is beautiful and with the right gear and settings, it is easy to capture a beautiful picture of the Milky Way. Taking this simple picture to the next step means adding foreground. For this example, a silhouetted tree line provides a very nice and not-too-hard-to-find foreground. The reflection of the Milky Way and tree line in the completely calm Island Pond takes the image to the next level.
 
By coinciding the trip schedule with the annual Perseid Meteor Shower, the hope is to get streaking Perseids as another detail to add to the image.
 
Adding all of these pieces together results in one of my favorite images from the trip. Here are some considerations from the making of this image:
 
One of the biggest issues with shooting stars at night is that it needs to be very dark. Obviously, the sun must be set - that's easy to schedule around. The moon phase and its location in the sky (no moon is best) can also be scheduled around. I had about an about-2 hour window to capture my star photos prior to the moon lightening the sky on this night.
 
Because it is dark out, a wide aperture lens is strongly prefered. I recommend an at-least f/2.8 lens and the Canon EF 24mm f/1.4 L II USM Lens is typically with me when I travel to dark sky locations. Wide angle focal lengths work best for this type of shot.
 
Even when using a wide aperture lens, long exposure times are needed. While the night sky appears very motionless when looked upon, stars are a subject in motion (from our perspective - due to a rotating earth - the earth is really doing the moving) and subject motion blur becomes apparent at the exposure times needed to generate a bright-enough night image. While an equatorial mount solves that problem, this solution does not work as well with a foreground included in the frame. These mounts are also a significant added cost.
 
High ISO settings are what I use. You need to select an ISO setting high enough to allow an exposure short enough to control the star trails. At 24mm, I prefer to keep exposures at 15 seconds (though I can accept 20-25 second images). Wider angle lenses will tolerate longer exposures - Longer focal lengths will show star trails more strongly at 15 seconds. Longer exposures also make a meteorite more likely to become part of your image. Or satellites (as shown here). Or an airplane (I cloned one out of this image)
 
I used ISO 3200 for this image, but pushed the sky exposure an additional stop and the foreground an additional 2 stops during post processing. An f/2 aperture was used for this image. The lens used has an f/1.4 max aperture, but I was experimenting with the reduced vignetting at f/2.
 
I highly recommend enabling long exposure noise reduction (an in-camera setting) when shooting the night sky. For each image captured, the camera takes a second, same length, exposure without the shutter open. The dark frame is then used to mask noise out of the first frame. Of course, all of the meteorites will show up during the dark frame.
 
Long exposure noise reduction, when used in conjunction with very long exposures, means that there is a lot of time spent waiting. Getting to this particular location had a relatively high cost - especially including time and energy. So, having two cameras simultaneously in use nearly doubled my take home from this night shoot.
 
The Canon EOS-1D X, with its incredible low light performance, was my primary DSLR for this shoot. Again, you are looking at an ISO 3200 long exposure picture that was pushed by 1 and 2 stops. I used the Canon EF 24mm f/1.4 L II USM Lens on this camera.
 
On my second tripod was a Canon EOS 5D Mark III - another excellent-performing camera. The 5D III had a Canon EF 14mm f/2.8 L II USM Lens on it much of the time.
 
The two camera setups gave me more compositions and more meteorite captures per hour. Both performed spectacularly. The viewfinder horizon level feature found in these two cameras was especially useful when framing the extremely dark scene.
 
I use Live View manual focus (find a bright star at 10x) and the 2-second self-timer with mirror lockup for shoots such as this one.
 
Shooting the night sky is a lot of fun - both from a results perspective and from the simple experience of watching the beautiful starry sky.

Layers of strong lines run through this Winter landscape picture. A narrow aperture is standard fare for the deep depth of field needed by a typical landscape photo.

The unbroken, curving lines of this Golden Retriever lead the viewers eye to the two fresh rawhide bones she is guarding.

A young lady plays the violin at her recital. The lighting at this venue is quite good relatively speaking. Good indoor lighting (almost an oxymoron) combined with a fast lens results in a lower ISO setting being able to capture the image.

It is amazing how fast a day disappears when photographing in Ricketts Glen State Park. I have been making a fall trip to this amazing park an annual tradition. Overcast days are best – and mid-week is the best time to go for low competition. The B+W 82mm XS-Pro MRC Nano Kaeseman CP Filter made a big difference in my shots on this day - cutting glare and reflections for rich, deeply-saturated results.

A little girl in her Christmas hat poses with her Christmas present horse. Lighting is ambient from windows and skylights. The wide aperture and shallow DOF helps eliminate the background clutter.

The wall this young subject is standing beside subtracts some light from her right side. The cloudy day's broad, flat light then has a little more direction - showing facial features better. The tunnel-like entrance in the background creates a frame for her head and the various walls add lines runing through the image.

This photo is destined for the "How NOT to Ice Skate" manual. A wide angle lens allows shooting down on your subject - which often allows a less-cluttered background and a different-from-usual perspective.

There is a lot of advice to be found regarding photography during the autumn season, but the primary visual difference of fall is the color of the foliage and to capture that color, one must go outside.
 
While that tip might sound simple, it is easy to sit in front of a computer or TV instead of making the effort to go out. You can DVR the football game to be watched later. Darkness comes earlier in the fall, so you have some time to catch up on the game or what is going on in the photography world after the light is gone. You can catch up on your post-processing backlog in the winter (what I'm telling myself).
 
A great fall location is Ricketts Glen State Park, near Benton, PA. With 22 named waterfalls in this park, along with many other photogenic woods and stream scenes, it is not hard to find wall-grade compositions. Located just below Waters Meet on the Falls Trails, Harrison Wright Falls, shown here, is one of my favorites.
 
Don't let the weather keep you inside. My favorite weather condition for shooting in RGSP is a light rain or immediately after any rain. The rain provides more flow in the stream, but it serves a couple of other important purposes. It keeps the other hikers and less-serious photographers out of the image (they stay home). It also makes everything in the scene wet, giving the surroundings a deep, rich color when photographed through a circular polarizer filters.
 
You will not capture images like this one indoors. Get out and find the colorful fall foliage. Get some exercise and breathe in the crisp air while doing so. Your body and mind will be rewarded along with your portfolio.

No, this huge stump is not that of a Sequioa - it is the remains of a very old evergreen in the Tall Timbers Natural Area in Central Pennsylvania. It makes a great playhouse. Wait, everything seems to make a great playhouse at this age.

A horizontally oriented version of another sample photo on this site. Shooting in different orientations is just one of many methods of gaining a different image from the same scene.

A mid-day sun turns the white sand in the shallow Florida Keys flats into one of my favorite colors. This location is many miles west of Key West.
 
I had a Lowepro Pro Roller x200 full of lenses to compare and evaluate on this 2-day private photo charter. The water, sky and clouds were my favorite targets.
 
A CP filter was used for this shot.

A flagstone-topped brick wall curves through the bottom of the frame, creating a solid base for both this image and the young girl standing on it. The 24mm perspective is one that adds depth to the subject while the wide f/1.4 aperture's shallow DOF (Depth of Field) softly blurs the background.

The 40' B. Reynolds Falls in Ricketts Glen State Park is an extraordinary landscape photography subject, offering many great compositions. In this composition, I used the swift-flowing water well below the falls as a foreground with the major falls falling into the background. A circular polarizer filter was used to cut reflections and increase saturation on this very cloudy and wet day.
 
The Canon EF 24mm f/1.4 L II USM Lens is an incredible landscape lens. I used this lens exclusively during the second half of this trip to Ricketts Glenn. All of my photos from this lens were exceptionally sharp.

The lines formed by this young, fallen ice skater's brightly clothed appendages lead through an uncluttered background of scratched ice in this frame. BTW - Its easier to shoot ice skaters when they are down. :)

For a young horse-loving girl, everything is a horse. That includes the small tree trunk growing beside this very large evergreen in the Tall Timbers Natural Area near Beaver Springs, PA.

B. Reynolds Falls in Ricketts Glen State Park is a falls that you can get behind. Be ready to get some water on you and your gear if you attempt this shot location. And watch your step. It bears mention that Ricketts Glen SP considers the Falls Trails "Most Difficult". You definitely have to watch your footing - people are injured here every year.

A little girl swings on a large grape vine that snakes through the frame. Her face shows the fun that this is.

A clear night in northern Maine presents an ideal opportunity for shooting the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. They don't make lenses with apertures wide enough to be ideal for night sky photography, but the 24 f/1.4 L II's f/1.4 aperture is about is good as it gets. You likely noticed that this shot was captured at f/2. I was experimenting with stopping down to reduce vignetting.

Ozone Falls is somewhat more challenging to capture than some other Ricketts Glen falls. Here I used wet, leaf-covered foreground rocks to lead the viewer's eye into the bright water framed by dark rocks. Brightly-colored fall foliage is always a bonus.

While upright is assumed to be the proper orientation for ice skating, this beginner understands that other orientations are often employed. This shot was framed so that the valley would form a "V" behind this young skater's head - drawing the viewer's eye to the subject. The ice forms the base for the image.

A tired girl rests against a tree in the Winter woods.

B Reynolds falls is one of the more versatile photo subjects in Ricketts Glen State Park. This falls looks great when shot from the walking bridge just downstream, from the rocks near the bridge, from the path beside the falls (as illustrated here) and even from behind the falls (for the more intrepid). For sure, the beauty is there for capturing. A circular polarizer filter was used for this image.