With Great lenses… comes great responsibilties…

rokinon3, originally uploaded by PowersImagery.com.

So I received a new lens a couple weeks ago. And honestly it bring photography full circle for me. The lens has no bells or whistles, its made by god knows who, and to top it all off, its Manual Focus… What i mean by full circle is, it makes me feel like i felt when first started using a 35mm camera.

My first 35mm SLR was a Minolta XD7 passed down to me by my cousin, Kien. He used it in college to make some extra bucks. And little did he realize by giving me this camera, it would do so much more for me than ever expected. It was simple, it came with one prime 50 1.4, camera body, and some long telefoto (i dont ever remember using) and a nifty auto winder. It had a certain odor to it, that can only be described as old. It was fun, but at the time, i didnt really know much about it. I remember he told me, read some books, learn the camera, blah blah blah. I was 13… I didnt care about that, i didnt like people telling me i HAD to learn things. So of course being an idiot, i just winged it. Sometimes i would get great photos, sometimes i wouldnt (ok, ok, most of the time i would get crappy photos) Nothing was ever consistent. However one thing using a fully manual camera taught me was how to see things through a looking glass. To think about what im seeing and what shapes and colors work together. But most importantly it taught me about how to use my eyes to manually focus a lens. So i digress, more on that history about me later on when you have about 10 hours of reading….

So fast forward 14 years… I have these future cameras that beep, whistle, and have these nifty windows on the back of them that show me a picture after its been taken!! Its like a polaroid! But after all this technology i still bought a Manual focus lens, with manual controls?? No Auto anything? No auto Aperture control, no Autofocus, no CPU data to the camera?? What is this Blasphemy I speak of…

Its a special diamond in the rough. Its a korean one at that. This lens is called the Rokinon 85mm 1.4 Aspherical. Its very special to me. It set me back a mere $200 shipped. And by far it has been the best bang for buck in my bag. Yes, i do have lots of very nice lenses, some i would even call magical. But none of which i got for a sub 1k price point. It has a very rugid build, great glass, and very good Image quality. The out of focus areas are buttery smooth. And well with its 1.4 max aperture, its very capable of low light capturing… Now you must be thinking to yourself, how low light can he possibly get with a Manual focusing lens? Thats the beauty of Nikon, it has this beautiful Manual focusing assist light in the bottom left of the viewfinder. It helps me get close and for critical focus, i use a method that was quite the norm back in the day… Its called Focus Bracketing. Where you take three or more frames while moving the focus ever slightly in and out, to ensure you get the correct thing in focus. Some say its cheating, i say its just smart shooting. Its not like the film days where you are wasting film, we have memory now. And lets face it memory is cheap! So shoot away friends! I dont condone spray and praying, but this type of bracketing is a useful tool.

Here is a sample shot with the 85 1.4 in low light at the Fabulous Festival at The Palms, Las Vegas, on September 5, 2009

Nikon D700, Rokinon 85 1.4. iso6400, 1.4, 1/100"