Lee Greatorex Photo/3D blog

New lens arrived a couple of weeks ago! These are a couple of test shots taken at Blarney Castle.

The lens is the 85mm Nikon 1.8G

I bought it for use with portraits mainly but I think it is a great lens for other shots as well. I took it around Blarney Castle on a very cold Saturday. Here are some of the results;

Above: It's funny but I tend to shoot more landscapes with anything but superwide lens'. I think it has a perspective which feels it can be walked in whereas for me superwide can seem a little distorted/trying too hard to emulate the eye rather than the view (personal opinion/taste)

Below: Katy with the D80+50mm 1.8


 

Overall I love it!

 There have been a few minor gripes with the lens however which I think was just a bit of unluck/could happen to any lens but the AF needed tweaking. I didn't realise this as these were literally the first shots taken but as I was zooming in on images to check sharpness I noticed unfortunately where my focus point was it was off by quite a bit.

Checking online I noticed it can be quite common with some lens/camera mixes and I have now got it fine tuned using the simple AF fine tune on the D7000 itself. The next blog post will explain how I did this myself and show some before/after test results.

Now I have it working as well as I can I have a few shoots to do this week then at the weekend I'll take it out and try to shoot some portraits!

My dad used to buy as many cameras/accessories from car boot sales as possible, usually picking up old box brownies or similar for about £5-10 each at most (giving me some of the duplicate or broken cameras he had). Along the way people tended to just give away the rest of the photo gear they had just to get rid of it.

After moving to Ireland I only managed to take 1-2 old camera bags with me (one of them containing a Bolex 8mm clockwork movie camera!). One of the bags has an old 35mm camera which needs some repairs and a lens which didn't fit it. the mystery lens fits my nikon though!!



The Marexar-CX 28-200 3.8 is a manual lens, the nikon doesn't recognize it (like the recent fisheye I bought) however it works fine in full manual mode. It has no lens cap and has taken a battering, nice heavy duty lens though looks like it could take a few more. From what I could tell the CX range was made between 84-94. Online reviews seem to be pretty positive about the lens! I was just surprised and happy it worked, I'm impressed with the results! Will give it more of a test soon. Here are the tests shots I took with it: (shots were from hand so may be a little motion blurred, ISO was quite high just to test it indoors)