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!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 9:33 am and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.