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Pictures taken after a cold wet night with a Tamron 24mm Adaptall lens (that cost a whole $11 including post) on my old Panasonic GH1.    One of the last shots I took with my old D200 Nikon.
This was with the Tokina 90mm macro lens. A great older DSLR that can be bought very cheaply nowadays.  Taken with a 40 year old manual focus Nikkor 50mm f1.4 lens on my super cheap GH1 Panasonic micro four thirds camera body via a $20 adapter. At f2.8, plenty of detail and a stunningly smooth rendering.
You can get adapters for nearly all the old Slr and interchangeable lens rangefinder film lenses on m4/3 (strictly manual focus and they multiply the focal length 2x). The prime lenses from the better brands (and some surprisingly cheap makers) can be lovely and full of character.  I've just done something I never thought I'd do; sell my lovely old D200 Nikon.
Don't get me wrong; I think it's still a superb camera and probably one of the best options for a serious but seriously financially challenged photographer, but I have a D300 and I love it just as much and I was thinking 'well do I need 2 Dslrs and should I get instead another better compact camera (than our S95 Canon) that I'll take with me more?' This little Panasonic was listed with it's famous 20mm 'pancake' lens for a bargain price, that I knew I'd more than recoup on the lens alone, so I snapped it up. I took a few test shots while pretty much set on selling it as I needed the money but...WOW! See above. The wee Gf1 is a pleasure to use; just like a classic film rangefinder and the 20mm f1.7 lens is solid gold. I don't think it optically gives up anything to my Tokina 90mm macro; fabulous! What a combination, I'm keeping it.  A lot of the reference photos you'll see of this lovely violaceous single rose tend to be blown-out magenta in tone.
I suppose it's because so many photographers (myself included) love late-in-the-day angled light with its associated warm colour shift. This is I think a much better representation of this rose (captured here under bright hazy light); it really is near-blue. Nice scent too.   It was a hot morning in the tea house and I couldn't resist the sheer overblown quality of this cactus's flowers
Now you have to deal with it too :-).  Light through a gap in the clouds after the rain; it's all about the light.
Such a common plant but so amazingly beautiful.  So beautiful and alien these structures and also surprisingly difficult to photograph well.
Getting the tone accurate in post-processing and dealing with the depth of the elements during the taking are the issues; but I'm happy with this result. Using my 10 year old D200 Nikon and my 25 year old 50mm Sigma macro. At lower ISO settings this combo performs to my complete satisfaction. I've been a bit distracted from posting recently but will be fixing that soon :-) |
Roger
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