Carl Zeiss 35mm Goodness

Hopefully you are not tired about me carrying on about Zeiss lenses like a school girl in love with a doe-eyed rock star.  But this lens is like a rock star.  It’s a professional, it’s sexy, and my Zeiss 35mm is on tour in my neighborhood with it’s warm-up lens, the Zeiss 18mm.

It’s also making me a better photographer.  Not because of the clarity and amazing smooth bokeh of the lens, but because it forced me to turn off that crippling auto focus and put the control in my hands. And not only for focus, but it encouraged me to turn everything to manual and I am finding out that I can really master the light now – not let the light master me.

The shot above was taken with the sun at its apex and not a cloud obscuring the light.  But through the use of manual control, I was able to get great dark tones without the aid of filters or Photoshop.

Manual is your friend.

I plan to do a little traveling to the mid-west and give it a workout – really need a change of scenery from the lake here!  Look for more experiments with the Zeiss class to come!

The Carl Zeiss ZF.2 Family

My somewhat disturbing fondness for my latest piece of glass – the Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2 – was so strong, and frankly quite fervent, that I decided to throw caution into the wind, damn my low bank account and upgrade ALL my gear to Zeiss.  Today, having successfully sold my ultra-wide Sigma and my Nikon Fisheye lenses, I was able to purchase the drool-inspiring Carl Zeiss 18mm f/3.5.

21mm Versus 18mm

So, you ask, “Ray, why the 18mm f/3.5 instead of the 21mm f/2.8?”  Good question.

The $300 difference in cost had nothing to do with it.  When you’re dropping $1500 on a lens, the price isn’t a factor anymore.  It’s about my style.  If you look at my stream from the days I was shooting on my D80 – it was 90% shot with my Sigma 10-20mm glass.  I love the incredibly obnoxious wide shots of landscapes.  And though the difference from 18 to 21 mm isn’t mind shatteringly huge, it’s enough.  I like to go as extreme as I can and since Mr. Zeiss isn’t offering up that sexy 16-35mm lens for Nikon yet, 18 is as wide as it gets for me.

Can I deal with f/3.5?

As for F-stop, the 3.5 and 2.8 are irrelevant for my shooting.  I do long exposure in low light for most of my nature shots.  Being on a tripod is my key.  I tend to keep the shutter open from a second to 30 minutes.  Though I do love lenses that hover below f/2.8 – in landscape photography, they are not a must.

So, What’s Next?

Well, I’ll be in poverty for quite some time now.  But that’s OK – it’s very much worth it.  I will now begin saving for the CZ 50mm ZF.2 Makro and the CZ 100mm ZF.2 Makro.  It’ll be at least a year before I can afford to do that.  I do have 2 more pieces of glass to sell off, but that’ll get me only $500 or so.

Perhaps the kind folks at CZ would like to donate one for me to promote?

Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2

And I just can’t sleep.  I am head over heels in love with my Zeiss.  Been shooting a variety of things to get used to it and it is just amazing.  The performance on my D700 has been flawless and I am now saving to revise my entire line of lenses.  I plan to get the Zeiss 18, (have the 35), 50, 85 and 100 and do away with everything else I have.  All that will be left to buy is the ever so elusive D700x or D700s, then my dreams will be complete!

But I digress.

So, for some samples of my Zeiss shots to date, have a look at what I have been posting on my Flickr stream.  Trying to capture color, depth and detail with the different exposures here. There is much more to come, but this is a teaser sample:

Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2

Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2

Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2

Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2

And one last one in HDR:

Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2

85mm Cream Machine

I usually have something technical to say about my shots.  This isn’t one of those times.  It’s my 85mm f.1,8 on full manual (including focus) while laying on my back by the lake.  I’ll let the creamy colors say the rest!

Sailboat in the Fog

Getting up at the crack of dawn is an monumental feat for me.  The snooze alarm is my worst enemy in photography.  But actually taking that extra effort to roll out of bed (and stop dreaming of the D700x) can really pay off.

The shot above was taken just before 5:00am – about 10 minutes before sunrise.  Some refer to this as the “blue hour” as everything seems to turn a shade of blue.  Though, yesterday, it had more of a purple glow to it.  There are no color enhancements here and this is pretty close to how it was seen with my eye.  The blue hour is a very unique time of day – just like the warm glow of dusk that tends to be in shades of yellows and oranges.  But you need to drag your rear out of bed to catch it.

This shot had the added benefit of a beautiful fog lifting from the lake – very thick on the water, but thin enough to let some of the sky color in.  So, with this successful shot, I will try to get up early, more often.

Model: Ashley Larose

Someone posed the question on Flickr today, asking my thoughts on getting tack-sharp photos.  Well, my theory is pretty simple, but would love to hear your thoughts as well:

1. Tripod. No matter what.
2. Sharp lens at it’s sweetest spot. (I like the Nikon 85mm @ f/4 range – give or take a bit)
3. Tripod.
4. Wired or wireless trigger. Again, remove all chances of shake.
5. Lock up the mirror prior to the shot. Reduces a minute amount of shake.
6. Tripod.
7. Focus on the eyes.
8. Did I mention a tripod?
9. Lighting can always help to keep the shutter fast, giving your subject less chance to flinch.
10. Damn, don’t have a #10. Let’s throw in the tripod again.

What do you think?

Tagging Photos - Be Creative - But Be Honest

If you are maniacal egocentric shooter and sheerly enjoy having people gawk at your photos to give you words of commendation and love, then smart tagging is a skill you really need to develop to feed your Ego.  Proper tagging will get your proper hits.  There are a mind boggling 60,000,000 sites out there with information on how to do this properly, so I am not re-inventing the wheel here.  Just adding my 2 cents to the topic.

I ran a test with the above photo on Flickr this week.  Among the tags, I added “sexy,” “naked” and “porn” as a play on words for this lens.  (I am also adding those tags to this blog to see what traffic is driven here).  I got over 100 hits in the first few minutes of posting the image.  Triple what I usually get in the first few hours! Sure, I got some pissed off people who were expecting to see Danica McKellar from The Wonder Years who just did a half naked photo-shoot with Maxim, but I also got the people that were searching on the legit words like “Nikon” “85mm” “portrait” and “lens” to stop by.

These are the guys I want to check out my work, leave comments on my stream and possible begin to follow me.  The ones that got here under false pretenses are not going to leave any constructive criticism – other than perhaps a few choice words about my mother.

By using proper tagging, you are making it easy for people to find your work.  You are making Google index your photos properly.  You are not being a pain in the ass.

For those that got here on my misleading tags, I apologize.  It was just to prove a point.  But I did give you links to the Maxim spread above!

Nikon D700's Best Friend

The photo above says it all.  Jamming that 85mm onto my D700x (just kidding, it’s still a D700) is a dream.  First off, I feel the D700 is the strongest camera in the Nikon lineup, yes, even over the D3x. Paired with the Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 lens – a fraction of the price of the f/1.4 – you get tack-sharp images across the entire focal range, a bokeh to die for, and a photo that needs very little post work.  I thought this was the ultimate set-up.

But wait, there’s more! After adding CS5 into the mix – well, now it’s just now heaven.

As I said in my previous post, CS5 offers a ton over CS4. Now that I have begun to dig into it, I am finding that I no longer need the quick tools for editing photos.  I used to used Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 3 and Silver Efex Pro within Photoshop to help me curve and balance my shots, tone map, or slam into B&W.  But the controls are so much better in Cs5 that I no longer have the need to use these quick little plugins.  I am able to generate any one of the effects they offered (for $300) very easily with the CS5 tools.  Yes, even tone mapping through the pseudo HDR tools built into CS5.

It doesn’t get better than this.  I could live a happy and full rest of my life with just these three items.  Well, of course I need my Mac Pro to do my edits, but that’s a given.

Color corrected in CS5

Wether you are shooting with a bottom of the rack Canon EOS Rebel (and by no means is it a slouch), a phantom D700s / D700x / D800 or a top of the line Caddy of Cameras, the Nikon D3x, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is looking more and more like your weapon of choice.

When I first began test-driving this program last week, I was under-impressed.  It seemed to have the same old stuff – be it jumbled around a bit – with no real flare to it.  But that’s because I wasn’t looking at it’s potential.  I was merely line curving and stamping my photos with my signature.  That’s not even scratching the surface of CS5.

What’s Better?

I found that as I dug deeper, there seems to be a much better control of RAW images and color correcting (as in the tulips above).  Also, though it wasn’t used in this image above, the selection tool is much more accurate then in previous editions of Photoshop.  Clicking on the center tulip above, the tool seemed to have no trouble differentiating it from the background.  Much better.

The content-aware fill is freaking witchcraft.  And yes, that’s a good thing.  I could punch a hole in one of the tulips above and CS5 will fill it in with how it believes it should look.  I didn’t think it would work that well, but gaddamnit, it’s amazing.

I also played with lens correction (not in this shot) and it does a much better job at correction distortion and vignetting. Pretty much how the old one worked, but better.  It’s nice that it just pulls the EXIF off the image and does the rest for you.

Another enhanced feature I like is the B&W conversions.  There is a new B&W Lab that will give you a ton of more options when converting, even, get this, HDR B&W Conversion.  Yes, create an HDR image while converting to B&W.  Cool!  There is also some new HDR creation tools built right in (for color shots)!

My favorite things have to be the better 64-bit support for my Quad Core Mac Pro and the impressive RAW file management.

This shit is the bees knees.