MartinDietzel Photography

For many years I have been shooting with Canon EOS DSLR cameras. The first digital camera was an EOS 10D that I bought in 2003. After shooting a few years with this camera and being happy, I had the chance to upgrade to an EOS 1Ds Mark III - what a monster of a camera! I really liked the handling, the image quality and the full frame sensor. Unfortunately this camera was stolen on the last day of a trip to the solar eclipse in Kenya, sitting in the hotel having breakfast in Nairobi. Don't ask... luckily all eclipse images were saved to an external harddrive. Many personal pictures though were lost, too.

Being undecided whether to switch the system then completely to a Nikon DSLR or even a mirrorless Sony Alpha camera, I decided to stay with a Canon DSLR, keep all lenses that I have and bought the Canon EOS 1Dx DSLR that I am still very happy with today.

Camera lenses that I use or used for the DSLR:

Canon EF-L 17-40mm f/4 - Used mostly for landscape and wide-angle starfield astro-photography
Canon EF-L 24-105mm f/4 - Sold this lens as I am thinking to upgrade to a 24-70 f/2.8 lens. Haven't done this yet, though...
Canon EF-L 70-200mm f/2.8 - Amazing image quality all the way to the edge of the fullframe sensor. Really good for portraits and also for astro-photography
Canon EF-L 100-400mm f/4-5.6 - Good quality telephoto lens for landscape and also for astro-photography with good image quality on the fullframe sensor
Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro - A macro lens is mandatory in the equipment collection. Image quality of this lens is surprisingly good
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 - Rather cheap but good compromise standard lens

Of course a lot more photography equipment and accessories are needed when you are on tour for a shooting...

Tamrac Apache camera bag and camera backpack
Manfrotto Befree Carbon tripod - the best travel tripod I have seen so far. Very light, very stable and can easily hold the EOS 1Ds with the 400mm telephoto lens on the ball head
Manfrotto heavy load tripod with geared tripod head - this combination is so stable that it can also hold telescopes. With the geared head I can even mount telescopes on this tripod and still do fine positioning
Ring flash - for portrait- and macro photography
Polarizing filter - just mandatory even though I hardly use this filter any more
Cokin filters (ND, fog and gradient filters) - the ND filter is good for long exposure effects, the fog filter is good for starfield astro-photography

Since astro-photography is also one of my passions, some specialized equipment for this is also required. Here I use a Skywatcher EQ-6 German equatorial mount that allows for mounting different telescopes. Depending on the desired object in the sky either the DSLR lenses can be used or a 80mm f/5.5 triplet APO or RC 8" f/8 OTA is used.
A cooled monochrome CCD from Moravian Instruments with 8 megapixel with electronic filter wheel allows for deepsky imaging.

Please also check the tipps, tricks and equipment review page for more details and some examples.

Photography equipment

DSLR cameras, lenses, filters, telescopes and accessories

Categories

Practical

General