Saturday, September 7, 2013

Large opening

As much as I love taking pictures, gear-wise I enjoy using a variety of lenses. I also have a certain dislike to certain type of lenses. However, I enjoy using large aperture lenses. Especially those primes that would open up their aperture diaphragm which lets in lots amount of light in.

Figure 1: Street lights bokeh I.
The downside is, these large aperture lenses are very costly, especially those which can auto-focus. The cheaper ones can live with no auto-focus. I recently have great interest in these line of lenses which are manual focus yet have good build and produce great image quality.

I do not have much experience with manual focus, but I am willing to learn due to my great interest in large aperture lenses and decided to go to that path and went ahead to purchase a second hand Samyang 85mm f1.4 lens. This focal length is suitable for portraiture and image isolation.

Figure 2: Street lights bokeh II.

The largest aperture lens with auto-focus is the Nikkor 50mm f1.8G which is great for object isolation too. I almost never use manual focus on this lens and always rely on the speedy AF-S motor. While it may be a hassle to manually focus your lens, there are some good points too for manual focusing.

Manual focusing in low light where the AF sensor of your camera fails is one of the great points of using manual focus. I don't intend to use this lens for fast moving objects though. So included in this post are a few shots of the bokeh or blurri-ness produce by the 85mm f1.4 on my crop-sensor camera.

Figure 3: Street lights bokeh III.

2 comments:

  1. Very nice bokeh,
    i seldom take this type of large aperture shots as i am more on the smaller side.

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    Replies
    1. The blur and image separation is very good with f1.4
      For landscape and wide angle shots I use small apertures of f8 above.

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