2009-02-13

Sassello January 2009 #8. A sense of place.



Following the wave here are some technicalities, I understand the needs to have some popular indexing. The frequent reader may leave at this point as what follows maybe of little sense.

I have a special love for manual focus lenses, I like to feel the movement of well greased helicoids. To have the opportunity to buy manual focus lenses (at a very low cost compared to the quality) is one of the reasons I bought Nikon even if I do not like at all their marketing and product policies. But when it comes to manual focus lenses I have to say that those are the best made I ever used. Before DSLRs I was in the Canon side, the manual focus series, they had nice lenses but none of them could compare with the jobs from Nikon.

In this series of landscape pictures I used a 20mm f4 AI, a 35mm f2 AIS, a 50mm f1.8 AF (replaced today with a 50mm f1.8 AIS) and a 28-105 AF zoom. I bought em on ebay for the grand total of circa 400$ before the FX price madness. Fortunately Nikon is pushing some new and heavily gadgeted lenses so we can hope in a sensible price lowering in manual focus oldies again.

My preferred one is the 20mm. Once, in film times I was an aficionado of the 24mm. The 20mm does not give me the same view, on a DX, but at least it has enough DOF for my needs.

Anyway the 20mm and the 28-105 zoom is a nice combination that covers almost everything and can still be cheaply assembled on ebay. Given the size of of the 20mm you wont need a bag. Only the camera with a lens attached, a tripod and the other lens in a pocket. Oh was forgetting, a Spot meter given my inability to fully understand why automatisms work the way they work (actually I skipped in toto the pages on how the various exposure modes worked and that is big plus). The external lightmeter was perfectly compatible with my Canons and now with Nikons :-)

Hope this will be enough for a few months.

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