Showing posts with label Nikon 50mm f1.8D. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nikon 50mm f1.8D. Show all posts

17 May 2013

A (fairly) Standard Three Light Portrait


Three Elinchrom lights used. Main light camera left Elinchrom 4 bounced into a black backed umbrella from about 45° up and 45° to the subject. Fill light camera right Elinchrom 4 about 1 stop down from main shot through a transparent umbrella. Back light Elinchrom 2 right and behind subject in a medium sized softbox. Nikon D300s and Nikkor 50mm f1.8D.

All this and another light, light stands, plus a background stand, backdrop, two cameras complete with lenses, plus a tripod all fit into one large rolling case to become my highly portable studio ready to leave and shoot on location at any time. Very convenient indeed!

18 Apr 2013

Available Light and the Nikkor 50mm f1.8D = Great Portraits!


My friend Mario is a well known figure in Malmö as he goes around reaching out to the homeless and needy of the city offering them food, friendship and a helping hand. He does all this without pay, and many times without thanks, but keeps simply plugging away. A real hero in my book!

Taken handheld with a D300s, 50mm f1.8D lens and whatever light was available. An aperture of f2.8 ensured a lovely out of focus rendition of the background and sufficient shutter speed to give a sharp portrait.

For those of you that care, here are the settings I used according to the exif data:
Manual, f2.8, 1/125s, ISO 400, auto white balance, and a quick run through DXO Optics Pro 8.

15 Feb 2013

Portrait with the Nikkor 50mm f1.8D


Have I mentioned before that the Nikkor 50mm f1.8D makes a really nice portrait lens? ;-) Hehe!

Lighting: Elinchrom D-Lite-it 2 with a snoot from above and behind the subject pointing down at the subject from the right side of the portrait. Elinchrom D-lite-it 4 with 65x65cm soft-box from above camera and very slightly left. Edited in Lightroom 4. Vignette added.

11 Jan 2013

Portrait of Ben (with Attitude)


Elinchrom D-Lite-it 4 snooted and shot from behind and right of the subject to give a little hair light action, Elinchrom D-Lite-it 4 through a smallish softbox aimed to just skim across the subject from camera left without throwing too much light onto the background, edited in Lightroom 4.3 to grunge the portrait up a bit. I used my favourite 50mm f1.8D attached to a Nikon D300s, with all manual settings applied.

25 Dec 2012

Bride and Groom Kissing outside the Chapel


An oldie from my days of film, and still one of my favourite wedding photos. I was shooting with a Nikon F801s camera and a Nikkor 50mm f1.8D lens, a real workhorse combination that served me well for many years!

I would still be happily shooting film but in South Africa it became harder and harder to find anybody who could still process film properly and without leaving smudgy fingerprints on my negatives. I think that as time went on and the old film guys who knew what they were doing in the darkroom retired they were replaced by anyone (young, cheap and inexperienced) who thought they could punch the right buttons on the mini lab machine, and the darkroom art died out.

This is the way of the world and unfortunately profits drive everything. Having recently moved to Sweden I have discovered that local processing labs simply don't exist, so film use seems to be off the cards unless I decide to process my own... C'est la vie, now I have been shooting digital for a number of years and the "old days" of film remain as a pleasant memory.

20 May 2012

Shooters!


I'm sure I posted this a long time ago, but I am revisiting some of my old pics. This one is from a small town in South Africa called Potchefstroom, and once a year they have a big "cultural" festival that has degenerated into an excuse to drink too much alcohol and behave badly.

If I remember correctly, this was shot with a Nikon F65 and 50mm f1.8D combination. A real light weight setup at the time and great for "street" pics! Ilford XP2 Super 400 film, if memory serves...

16 Nov 2011

Shades


Another day another product shoot!

Nikon D90, manual mode, 200ISO, f11, 1/200s, Nikon 50mm f1.8D, Nikon sb700 and sb600 bounced in umbrellas left and right high. Set-up shot below.


Stock card seamless white background held up against the wall by duct tape. No photographer should ever be without duct tape!

This would have worked much better with a light tent... but I don't have one. Someone recently told me that photography is about problem solving, so sometimes you just gotta make a plan!
Note to self: get a light tent...

4 Oct 2011

Portrait of a Man


The eyes are the windows to the soul, and in photography we can capture that part of the reflection of the human soul for all the world to see. Isn't it all the more important then to make sure that all of our photographic skill is focused on capturing a persons eyes first and foremost and deal with the rest of the person as being only secondary to a successful portrait?

26 Sept 2011

Bowl of Rice


And below the set-up shot for "Bowl of Rice".


Normally I would try to get rid of the light spill from the flash shooting into the umbrella, but in this case it actually helped with the light I was trying to achieve by reflecting some light from slightly behind the subject.

Nikon D90, Nikkor 50mm f1.8D, f4.5, 1/200s, Nikon sb700 flash shot through a white umbrella with the wide angle flash diffuser out, hand held.

13 Aug 2011

Seamless White Background - How To

Just in case anybody was wondering how complicated it is to do a seamless white background product photo shot like the one below, I have included a shot at the bottom of this post to show how simple it can be done.


...and the promised setup shot:


Really not complicated at all! The flash was triggered via Nikon's cool CLS system. The groovy light stand is explained at another post here.


20 Jan 2011

The 50mm f1.8 as a portrait lens

On a crop sensor camera a 50mm lens gives an equivalent focal length of about 75mm for Nikon and 80mm for Canon. This gives a greater distance between camera and subject, and crops out part of the image from the lens, and therefore two things happen:
1.) Distortion from being too close to your subject with a 50mm lens is eliminated because you have to stand further back to get the same framing. This pushes it a little closer to being a standard "portrait" lens, especially on a Canon.
2.) The weakest part of the cheaper 50mm lenses are the edges where fringing, aberrations etc. occur. But because the sensor is smaller these weaker areas are effectively cropped out all together and we are left with only the best part of the image! Oh yeah!


At the ridiculously low price of the "standard" 50mm f1.8 lens this means that it makes perfect sense to invest a small bit of cash to get near "pro" results! To get the same quality from a zoom you will be spending a LOT more money, and it will be larger and heavier to boot.

More "pros" than will care to admit it carry the nifty fifty in their bags, just ask them for a peek in their bags, it will be there somewhere. Ask Chase Jarvis, he has one in his bag too.

And if you are an "oldie" photographer and like the 50mm focal length because that was your favourite back when you still used a film camera (remember film?) then consider the Nikkor AF-S 35mm 1:1.8G DX  for a crop sensor Nikon cameras as it gets closer to what is considered a "normal" focal length which in this case equates to 52mm. I also hear good things about the Sigma 30mm f1.4 DC HSM for most brands of crop sensor cameras. These are both great for half body, full length or environmental portraits and also for small group shots, giving superb performance for a low cost, although I from what I hear the Sigma might not be as cheap as the Nikkor.

So if you have examples of portraits with the "nifty fifty" then please post a link to them below for the benefit of us all!

13 Oct 2009

Abstract Art From Film



The bokeh from my 50mm f1.8 Nikkor is just simply wonderful!

Nikon F801s, Nikon 50mm F1.8D, Fuji Superia 200 iso cheap consumer film, developed and extremely badly scanned by my crummy local lab. Edited with the Gimp.