Nikon's New Magic Portrait Lens
Announcing a new direction for this blog – I’m going to include talking about photography and gear!
About two weeks ago, I picked up Nikon’s latest lens from Precision Camera & Video here in Austin, Texas. This lens is officially called the AF-S NIKKOR 105mm f/1.4E ED Lens – most folks call it the 105 f/1.4 – I call it “magic”. This lens is really special because of its ability to render backgrounds into a dreamy blur. Last week, I had the opportunity to try out this lens with local model, Michelle, aka “Kitten Kaboom” (Facebook: facebook.com/modelkittenkaboom, Instagram: instagram.com/misskittenkaboom).
Michelle and I headed out to a local park and took about 300 photos in an hour and a half. Of course, Michelle looked gorgeous but how did the lens do? In a word, outstanding. This lens has the ability to make an image that is both sharp and soft – nice sharp details where you focus and a super-soft, creamy background (aka “bokeh”) providing a delightful background.
For the tech geeks reading this, I used a Nikon D810 camera body with this lens and the combination of the D810 and 105 f/1.4 certainly showed any mistakes I made as a photographer! I used a Phottix Indra 500 to light these images and camera settings ranged from ISO 64 – ISO 200 with a shutter speed of 1/60 to 1/1600 sec. All images were shot at f/1.4. The only processing done to these images was using Lightroom for RAW conversion including assigning the camera profile and white balance then resizing for web. No retouching has been done to these files. Nikon hit it out of the park with this lens and I predict portrait photographers are going to start saving to get their own copy of this magic lens.
About two weeks ago, I picked up Nikon’s latest lens from Precision Camera & Video here in Austin, Texas. This lens is officially called the AF-S NIKKOR 105mm f/1.4E ED Lens – most folks call it the 105 f/1.4 – I call it “magic”. This lens is really special because of its ability to render backgrounds into a dreamy blur. Last week, I had the opportunity to try out this lens with local model, Michelle, aka “Kitten Kaboom” (Facebook: facebook.com/modelkittenkaboom, Instagram: instagram.com/misskittenkaboom).
Michelle and I headed out to a local park and took about 300 photos in an hour and a half. Of course, Michelle looked gorgeous but how did the lens do? In a word, outstanding. This lens has the ability to make an image that is both sharp and soft – nice sharp details where you focus and a super-soft, creamy background (aka “bokeh”) providing a delightful background.
For the tech geeks reading this, I used a Nikon D810 camera body with this lens and the combination of the D810 and 105 f/1.4 certainly showed any mistakes I made as a photographer! I used a Phottix Indra 500 to light these images and camera settings ranged from ISO 64 – ISO 200 with a shutter speed of 1/60 to 1/1600 sec. All images were shot at f/1.4. The only processing done to these images was using Lightroom for RAW conversion including assigning the camera profile and white balance then resizing for web. No retouching has been done to these files. Nikon hit it out of the park with this lens and I predict portrait photographers are going to start saving to get their own copy of this magic lens.