The New Russar+ takes knockout wide angle shots – follow these tips and tricks to get the best out your lens!
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Landscape Shooting
- Place people or objects at different points in your landscape shots. Experiment with your favorite view of a wild coastal scene or any wide open space. You can experiment by placing subjects in the foreground and in the distance – the view will still be amazing and the photo will have a lot more personality!
- Use lines in your landscape shots to create a sense of movement. For example, a curving road starting in the foreground and leading to the horizon
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Architectural Shooting
- The New Russar+ takes great architectural shots because it exaggerates the sense of scale and makes lines appear stronger. Try to capture these lines at different levels, from down below, up above and level with the horizon. And see the effects you can create with the New Russar+.
- Take a building or monument and get active! Photograph it head on, to capture it symmetrically and gradually get more experimental by shooting from all angles possible!
- You don’t have to go to a monument for architectural shots – look around where you live and see what you can create.
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People Shooting
- The New Russar+ performs really well in enclosed spaces because of its short focal length. Try the classic ‘in your car’ shot. Or, even better, add as many people as you can to the mix and be amazed!
- Stand above a subject or a group and see how the New Russar+ captures emotion and expression from this crazy angle.
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Street Shooting
- The New Russar+ is great for street photography because its wide angle focal length will soak up all the action - Go to a demonstration, a street party or a festival and see how the New Russar+ effortlessly captures a giant crowd!
- Crowds don’t mean just people – see if you can catch a bird in midflight!
- And some of the best photography is taken up-close, so really try and hone in your subject.
Focusing Tips
Hyperfocal Distance Focusing
With its two hyper-focusing points covering 0.5-0.9m and 1m-infinity, the New Russar+ is great for taking quick snap shots. Hyperfocal distance focusing is often used for landscape shots in which you would like all near and distant objects to stay sharp. Focusing your lens at the hyperfocal distance ensures maximum sharpness from half this distance all the way to infinity. Wide angle lenses such as the New Russar+ have short focal lengths and therefore a deeper depth of field (depth of field is the range of the photo that is in focus). By setting the hyperfocal distance, you can maximize the depth of field in your picture.
Hyperfocal focusing can easily be used on lenses such as the New Russar+ that have a depth of field indicator. It’s a great example of how the manual settings on the New Russar+ can allow you to take real control of your shots.
On the New Russar+, you can see markings that indicate what portion of the focus scale is in focus for a given aperture. Each aperture is marked twice when you look at the lens from the top.
Now you can set the infinity marking to the focus marking for your current aperture. After doing this everything from the distance indicated in the first marking up to infinity is in focus. So the first marking gives you a minimum distance that you need to keep from objects so that they are in focus. For example, by stopping down to f11 on the New Russar+ and setting the lens to the hyper-focal distance, everything from 0.6m on will be in focus - pretty much everything on the focus scale is focused. For wider open apertures like 8 or 5.6 the focus range is still pretty big.
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F5.6 on foreground
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F5.6 on hyperfocal
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F5.6 on infinity
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F8 on foreground
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F8 on hyperfocal
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F8 on infinity
