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Question on wide angle lenses

Joe - Not me - once a person has made a decision I do not make a comment on their choice. However interesting that you remembered some of my ramblings <g>

Gary - In spite of the comments re 50mm and 35mm film - I always found the 35mm lens with 35mm film a more comfortable combination of ratios. I felt restricted with the 50mm especially in the days of the fixed lens rangefinder and earlier cameras.
 
Derek,

JHowever interesting that you remembered some of my ramblings <g>.
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Well, the shaker thing is a useful feature on a digital camera with interchangeable lenses. But, you know how it is. You can't have it all -- the full-frame sensor of the expensive Canons, the ergonomics of the pro Nikons, the sensor shaker of the Olympuses (¿ Olympi ?) all in a mount that takes my old MF Nikkors... or F-mount Zeisses if they live up the the hype.

Joe
 
Joe - As I said once a decision is made I leave it alone - I know why I went the way I did and have no regrets about it. It has allowed me to take some 'reasonable to me' pictures some of which have been published or used to benefit the organisation I occasionally volunteer for.
 
Derek,

Fair enough. I'm just saying there's a lot of merit in your choice of camera.

Joe
 
Money willing I might have made different choices, unfortunatly E1s do not cost 450 quid.
 
I got a blob of dust on my D50 - took it back to London Camera Exchange, who blew it out with a hand-held blower very easily. You turn on "Mirror Lock" in the menu, which exposes the sensor while turning it off so as not to attract more dust.
 
Well I went out today to have a play on this prime lens. I can see immediatly what is meant by 'fast lens'

Although this one is by no means fast it is certainly able to stop down a lot further than anything I have used before.

By the way, please correct me if I am using the wrong terminology!

Anyhow here is a standard slightly prosaic dusk scene, it was getting towards low light when I shot this and at this time I had the aperture set right down with a shutter speed of around 800.

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I think I will save for a 35mm prime lens, I can see this is going to be a lot more enjoyable and satisfying than a zoom lens.
 
This is a shot straight off the camera, no adjustments.

The main issue I have with the D50 is it takes and saves shots so quickly, I was only outside for 20 minutes and had 300 shots to deal with.

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Gary,

I think I will save for a 35mm prime lens, I can see this is going to be a lot more enjoyable and satisfying than a zoom lens.
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If you want AF, the 35mm f/2 AF Nikkor is the one -- the only one -- to get. If you want MF, the 35mm f/1.4 is the best, followed by the f/2 version followed by the f2.8 one.

Of course, you could wait a while to see if the ZF lenses live up to the hype.

Joe

P.S. Stop down means a smaller aperture. You stop down to, say, f/11 from f/4. The reverse is called opening up. It's an archaic term from the early days of photography.
 
Unfortunately I may have in previous posts been saying the wrong thing.

When the aperture is wide open, this is when the F numbers a smallest yes?

So if I 'stop down' I am making more of the available light to the sensor?

Lost in translation haha.
 
ZF are the Zeiss lenses for the Nikon F mount.

My bank manager is writing to you in the strongest possible terms, iGary.
 
"When the aperture is wide open, this is when the F numbers a smallest yes?"

Yes.

"So if I 'stop down' I am making more of the available light to the sensor?"

No. Stop down = decrease the aperture = less light. The 'aperture' is of course just a hole and if you look thgoh the back of a manual lens while changing the aperture on the lens iteself you'll see the hole in question. This will make the relationship between f number and amount light very obvious.

Do you now, by the way, understand why people favour manual cameras for learning photography? Many people with fancy SLRs use them for years and never quite figure out this basic relationship between aperture, shutter speed and exposure (i.e. "amount of light") because they are so divorced from the simple physical principles involved by some uber electronic mechanism.

Anyway congratulations you are, by the way, now at Stage 1 of The Improving Photographer!

Matthew

PS In the Vuk Hair Shirt School of Photography you are allowed to take 3 sunset pictures ever so you shuold probably keep your 3rd for soethign really spectacular. If you take your 4th sunset picture a balding, white haired German in a black polo-neck jumper will come aroudn and beat you to death with a 1960s era soviet Telephot lens.
 
Hey, listen I know that sunset pictures are by the very nature of the fact they are there every bloody day quite boring, but the light is bad, I am not getting home till late and behind my house is mostly farm land, its not the most stunning stuff.

As possibly the first lesson is to find something good to shot I shall pray for good weather Saturday.

In the mean time I have taken a shot of the hifi which is also boring, however in this instance I really did stop down the aperture and went for a 2 second shutter speed.

Lesson number two, remember everything. In this case I forgot the ISO which was set to 1600. Sigh.
 
Gary,

Whilst you still have a lens fetish, get yourself a true macro lens (prime, of course). It's quite a different world up-close and you can find all sorts of interesting shots virtually anywhere. OTOH, I think it's more important to have a reliable light meter. Setting your camera and lens to manual exposure control and learning how to combine aperture and shutter speed will give you a good grounding in dealing with various lighting conditions.

James
 
James, I have a fetish for all shiny things, but my money has seriously ran out haha.

Here is a hifi shot taken at ISO200, the aperture set right down and a shutter of 20 seconds (trying to beat Joe)

Ballsed something up here haha.
 
A little wishy washy, but I am learning. I had some more 'punchy' shots by opening the aperture a touch and using slight shorter shutter. But I'll be honest manual focusing is reasonably difficult in low light, so I will need to save for an AF prime at 35mm, this is not going to be cheap. Someone sell me one for 20 quid. Its all good karma.
 
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