Homestay with Fruit Orchard
Petzval 85mm and 58mm lenses are two focal lengths available presently and both of them are characterized by their immensely swirly bokeh, strong field curvature, and sharp central focus. For lomography lovers and for photographers who long for something different, these happen to be a very attractive lenses.
(Petzval 85mm f/2.2 lenses, in golden and black colors)
After receiving requests from my readers, following the last published article on books for photographers, here is another similar list on the top movies that every photographer should see. There are a good number of documentaries but this is a list of films with a story-line, which you can enjoy with your non-photographer friends too.
What to do on a wet autumn day? Take the camera out and indulge in photography! However not always does that happen. Sometimes laziness takes over and a cup of hot coffee is what is required with a good book to read. For photographers, here are some books that I recommend whenever you get any free time.
A dark ND filter is a necessity for long exposure times when the ambient light is very high. After reading various reviews and collecting feedback from photographer friends of mine, I bought a Hoya PRO ND 1000x filter. I could not get it on time for a recent trip that I had made but I still managed to use it for some test photographs.
Nikkor 200 mm f/4 AI is a great lens in a small form factor. It is sharp and very well built lens that was introduced in 1977 when Nikon came up with the concept of AI. 200mm occupies is a sweet spot in the variety of focal lengths available. It is not too short as 105 or 135mm lenses. The close-ups of faces look more pleasing due to the change in perspective by using a 200mm lens. The lens is also not as long and heavy as 300mm Nikkors which can be quite uncomfortable for hand-held use.
(Nikon Df with Nikkor 200mm f/4 AI at f/11, 1/100 sec)
Continue reading Nikkor 200 mm f/4 AIStrobes (flashes or speedlights) can be quite confusing when multiple units are to be used. Nikon’s Creative Lighting System (CLS) is the easiest way to deal with this confusion. This is a system which does remote triggering of speedlights, high speed sync, flash color correction, and advanced i-TTL fill flash…. everything wirelessly. Nikon launched the Nikon SU-800 as a control unit for its CLS system. The communication happens over infra-red. Over the last many years, this commander unit has remained unchanged and now there are third party options available that also work with the CLS. Recently I was in the market searching for a commander unit to control my speedlights remotely. This article is a summary of what I learnt and a short review of the Nikon SU-800, that I finally bought.
I do macro photography once in a while and have tried various lenses. One of my favorites is Micro Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 AI-s. Nikon calls its macro lenses as ‘micro’. Its specifications are easily available on internet. Nikon introduced this lens in 1983 and was based on their similar micro-Nikkors of varying speeds. It is a manual focus lens.
(Micro Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 AI-s)
I was recently faced with a tough choice. I wanted to buy a 135mm lens for a full frame camera body. Purpose was for an all-rounder lens to carry around. I wanted a lens to do portraits, sometimes click pictures of butterflies, street photography as well as occasional family pictures from vacations. 105mm lenses were a little short for the kind of portraits I had in mind so I did not look at those options. 135mm is the ideal focal length for portraits according to me. The flattening is almost perfect and the angle of view ideal. I did a lot of research on 135mm lenses and tried out a few.
After searching around and trying various optics, I was left with two choices –
