The Flannel Family part 1

A few friends and I decided to have a flannel themed photoshoot.  From the set, here's the big "keeper" of the set.  

I'll go through the steps of how it came to look like how it does.

First, the camera body.  I'm using a Canon 5D mark 1.  Sometimes I see the new 7D's and 5DmkII's and get envious, but as of 5 years ago, the 5DmkI was the top of the line camera.  And photos 5 years ago are as good as they are today, so buying better gear isn't always the solution.

The body can only give you so much.  From what I've learned, the body has two main functions:  Focus, and metering.  Anything else you can fix in post processing such as Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop.  If your picture is either 1) out of focus or 2) over/underexposed, theres not much you can do to fix that.  Theres only a few other problems a body will solve: card write time, frames per second, and so on, but if you think that by buying a better camera you can take amazing pictures, you are mistaken.

The second important part of your gear is the lens.  Theres tons of information on lenses online, but to keep it short, I like to use prime (one focal length) lenses.  These lenses dont zoom, but in exchange for the lack of zoom, prime lenses produces sharper pictures.  For this picture, I used a Canon 20mm f2.8 lens.  Its not a pro series lens, just a plain old prime that ran me about $375 off craigslist.  

Another important part is the lighting or the flash, but that wasnt used in this picture.

Thats all for this time, but next time I will go into detail about the metering options, shooting in RAW, and post processing software and techniques I used.