Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS STM Lens Sample Pictures

In my mind, there is only one thing to do when a cresent moon and a great sunset coincide. Take pictures of course. Where to place the moon in the frame becomes the big question. I liked how the brighter red clouds running through the bottom of the frame balanced the more-left positioned moon.
 
This picture shows how big you should expect the moon to be in your 250mm APS-C sensor format images. Full frame DSLR owners would need a 400mm focal length for the moon to be reproduced at this size.

I live near the Susquehanna River and spend a lot of time on it. It is a beautiful lazy river, but I find good images of this water to be elusive. I have relatively few. This of course means that I need to keep trying harder.
 
On this morning, I was chasing fog. Unfortunately, it lifted before I arrived at my choice of destinations.
 
Moving to a nearby location, I was able to make a handheld panorama of some nice clouds that showed up after the fog lifted along with their reflection in the mirror-like calm water. A centered waterline is often to be avoided in landscape images, but they can work well when reflections are being captured.
 
I used a CPOL filter to add some pop to the clouds during capture and reduced the sky exposure slightly in Photoshop during post processing. Photoshop was used to merge the multiple images.
 
This image was captured about 1 mile north of McKees Half Falls, but note that there is no good place to pull off of the highway here. And I was precariously standing on a steep rock slope to clear the shoreline vegetation.

When using a lens with a maximum focal length of 250mm and a maximum aperture of f/5.6 on an APS-C format DSLR camera, getting a diffusely-blurred background can be challenging. Even though the referee and opponent are not close to the foreground player, the remain in focus enough to be part of the image.
 
Good framing, with the more distant background completely surrounding all three people, keeps this image clean.

In this image, I wanted to capture the layered rock structure behind Harrison Wright Falls along with the moss growing on it. I allowed the motion-blurred falls to consume about 1/3 of the frame and the rock to take over the remainder.

Fall is for football. And the 50 yard line is probably where you want to watch it from.

There are seemingly endless telephoto compositions possible at Harrison Wright Falls. Simply stand back and compose a portion of the falls into the frame with or without background inclusion. Then revisit at a different waterflow level and all new possibilities show up.

There were a string of amazing sunsets occuring while I was evaluating this lens. And telephoto lenses need only marginally nice sunsets to create great pictures due to their narrower angle of view. Not as much sky needs to be in blazing color to fill the frame.
 
In this image, I tried to balance the brighter sky with the spruce silhouette.

This is the view of a football stadium from a 55mm perspective. Most zoom lenses have some barrel distortion at their widest focal lengths, as exampled here. Notice that the row of seats do not stay even across the top of the frame and that the white sideline is not perfectly parallel to the bottom of the frame.
 
Yes, distortion can be corrected during post processing. But, distortion correction is destructive at the pixel level.
 
What to do about distortion? Use a lens that has no distortion (typically a prime). Use a focal length that has little or no distortion. This focal length varies by lens, but 20% into the focal length range is a good starting point. Correct the distortion in post processing. Or just live with the distortion.
 
Distortion makes holding the camera level more challenging. Especially to one already challenged to do so.

The lens I was evaluating had a 55mm focal length on the wide end, but the sunset needed a much wider angle to be fully captured in all of its glory. So, when focal length limited on the wide end, simply shoot a panorama. The result is a 47+ megapixel image that I not only can use as-is, but can (and did) also crop into various still-high-resolution images.
 
A bonus that cannot be seen at this reduced size is that venus is visible through a break in the red clouds.

Getting the ball into the end zone is the goal of the game, but my goal was much easier – to simply capture the colors in a balanced, attractive way. For this shot, I found the small amount of green in the corners to suffice.

At Ricketts Glen State Park, the waterfalls are generally falling over rock faces that have no trees on them (for good reason of course). This means that getting colorful fall foliage in your images requires some effort. That colorful foliage is often found above the falls, which means shooting with, at least some, upward angle included in the shot. Upward angles that do not include the bright sky become more challenging.
 
In this image, I zoomed in to frame just the top of the highest waterfall in the park, the 94' Ganoga Falls.

Want a dramatically-colored background? Use a sunset. For this shot, I simply got very low to the ground to position the bright post-sunset sky just under the field grass.

Ozone falls can be a challenging shoot. With bright water flowing over wet, black rock under a bright background yields a dynamic range issue for both the camera and for an appealing image. An HDR technique is the answer. This image is the result of two pictures blended together. The water and trees are from a shorter exposure than the dark rock.
 
A challenge also arises when shooting water with exposures long enough to create a motion blur. Any breeze present will create a similar blur in your leaves.

Shooting nice sunset pictures with a telephoto lens is easy even when the show is a simple one. For a clean image, I used a strong foundation of dark mountain and allowed the cloud bank to be fully vertically contained in the frame.