After watching a bazillion (or is it a gazillion?) YouTube videos about photography in an attempt to get my artistic juices flowing again, I took the advice I was hearing, grabbed by camera out of my car, and walked across the street with my camera in hand. This camera makes it almost too easy to take interesting images.
I used my new Nikon Zf, with a cheap lens mount adapter, and an old Kalimar 50mm f/1.7 manual lens I use on my Pentax cameras. I found the Kalimar at Etsy or the eBay I think, not sure. I do remember it was $16 with free shipping about 3 years ago.
The images were taken in the dark (obviously). The ISO was set to 6400 (I’m old, and that feels insanely high). The camera goes up to 25,000 (no wait; 204,800 ISO extended, 64,000 ISO standard) and my Pentax K-3 iii goes to 1,000,000. So, 6400 ISO isn’t crazy with today’s cameras. If you zoom in, you’ll see the ISO noise even after I did a little denoise in Darktable.
This lens has never been my favorite because it never felt sharp and lacked any appealing character. Even on my Pentax cameras (where this lens was at home), never felt special. Especially at wide open (1.7/f), it really got messy. These images are changing my opinions about this lens. They have a very nice feeling for me. Soft, almost clearly in focus, enough to make you look, with a very tight depth of field making them feel weirdly dreamy.
Tonight, I brought my “new to me – Used” Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 (SE) to play with. The also used, Nikkor 40mm f/2 (SE) was supposed to get here today also, but it is stuck in Newark (NJ). I linked them from here, but they’re not the same price I paid in the links (I’m not rich). Hopefully I’ll get tonight’s images posted sooner than this set.
I’ve taken pictures here before, a few years ago maybe. They were in the daylight though. It is always fun for me to take photos at night, because the normally mundane looks amazing after everyone has left, the sun fell out of the sky, and everything feels abandoned.
