D700, 28-300 VR. When using the Nikon D700 of the street I find I keep coming back to this lens again and again. Simply put, if you see something happening, you can photograph it. Picture quality is more than adequate and the focus is as swift. It may not be as surgically sharp as the nano coated lenses or have their microcontrast, but really – who needs that with street pictures ?
A searing social satire. Nikon D700 24mm 1.4
It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of shooting subjects flat or side on which produces lots of horizontal and vertical lines. Adding diagonals into a pictures adds buckets of energy to the shot.
Nikon D700 with 24-120, processed in Silver Efex Pro 2
After the brick shots (see below) I decided it was about time to try the 50mm Summilux out on some real world shots.
I find that these range finder lenses are quite easy to focus using the EVF even at f1.4 without having to zoom in – the image “pops” when in focus just like they used to with 35mm film cameras.
All pictures below were shot wide open (ie at f1.4).
In the brick testing, I was quite disappointed at the edge quality of all my rangefinder lenses wide open, but with real life 3 dimensional objects these shortcomings (assuming that my adapter isn’t in some way defective) are very difficult, if not impossible to see.
Any picture which takes a moment to fathom out is good (London, Nikon D700, 28-300)
One decision that has to be made with each picture is whether to convert to black and white or keep in colour. My simple way of dealing with this is to ask whether the colour adds anything to the picture. If it doesn’t out it goes.
Also, portraits usually look much better in black and white – “When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls” (Ted Grant)
My favourite cameras for B&W are medium format film filled with Tri-X or HP 5. Nothing comes close to them for the gradation of tones. The best digital to date has been the Leica M8, although the X-Pro 1 is quite decent, but I’ll explore this more soon.