The lens that I’ve been using the longest as a photographer is the Nikon 105mm f/2.8G Macro – the F-mount lens, that is. Nikon has been selling it since 2006, and in that time it’s gained a lofty reputation (not just among macro photographers, either). Today, I’m reviewing it in full.
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Composition, as it’s usually explained, is the way you arrange the visual elements within a photo. But that definition misses something. A large portion of what’s important when composing a photo isn’t within the photo at all. Instead, it’s the bits outside the frame that are completely excluded from the image.
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I remember when I was starting out in photography how I looked upon the Nikon D3X in wonder. I could never afford it, but 24 megapixels! Can you imagine? Of course, some medium format cameras at the time had more, but they were as far away from me as the moon.
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A good combination, especially when you have the lovely, chameleon-like Thais D’Lima in front of the lens. Brazilian born, based in LA, and capable of many looks. The pic below is available light through a fence at the studio of my dear friend, Gianluca Bertone, who runs Bertone Visuals in Los Angeles. Wonderful photog, and his video/rental company is an amazing resource for west coast photogs.
She posed for this series during a time when I was able to experiment with the Nikon 58mm Noct lens, which pulls in, f-stop-wise, at a nifty, off the charts wide open value of .95, making it the fastest lens I’ve ever used. (Writing a bit about this session, as we just ran the above pic on our Instagram, and a few folks had some questions.)
Wide open, manual focus, DOF razor thin. Like the robot used to say in Lost in Space, “Danger! Danger!” But, there are tools to assist. I shot these with the Nikon Z 7, and in this mirrorless generation of tech we are graced with, I used the pinpoint mode of the focusing system, in tandem with focus peaking, to sort out and certify what my eyes were telling me. (With the pinpoint or single area in manual focus, the little box goes green when you hit it right.) Add to that the instantaneous one button push to 100% zoom, in the viewfinder, I could tell if my focus pull was accurate. Painstaking, to a degree, and certainly not a practical approach for many jobs, but the crystalline sharpness and dreamlike drop of DOF is worth the work, at least on this occasion.
Another strategy? I used a Gitzo Systematic on this shoot even though the lens is not over-long. But it does have heft. So tripod was the way to go, on a ball head, which I had loosely braked. I would pull a focus, and then literally rock ever so slightly back and forth at camera, all the while shooting on high consecutive on the power drive. That worked well, along with the acceptance I was not going to be tack sharp, all the time.
I did mention a variety of looks Thais can offer in front of the lens.
All thanks to Lynn DelMastro who produced this shoot, and Claire Piao, a marvelous makeup artist based in LA. We went from studio light and looks, to raw sun, all done at .95 on the Noct.
The light, the lens, the subject, the makeup, all swirl into different looks, done in a day. It was fun, albeit nerve-wracking, to play on the edge of the cliff called depth of field.
More tk….
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It’s May Day, the celebration of spring! The snow has remained here only on the highest mountain peaks and where it managed to hide from the sun’s rays. For the last time today, the children and I threw snowballs at each other. Today I saw some beautiful butterflies flying among the trees in the forest. However, I didn’t go butterfly hunting today. My target was a bird that resembles a larger hummingbird in size. Europe’s second smallest bird, the Firecrest. And when the sun was too harsh to photograph, I sat down on a moss cushion and looked for weekly sales for you.
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