English Version
(version française dans l'article juste en dessous)
[ENG]
My thoughts about photo gears are quite paradoxal. I want to believe that I'm-a-freeman-and-not-just-a-number, so I'd easily tell you that your equipment should be the last piece of the great chain of the small creative process (or is it the other way round?). And I do have a strong faith in that philosophy. In the very first place, it's what you've got in your guts and in the fathomless depth of your mind that make you take a picture, wether you are aware of that process or not. So, if you want to improve your photography, rather than getting a better camera, I think that you should just take a deep breath and look inward before framing what's around. The more you'll listen to yourself, the better you'll click. Thy shall not spend (lose) too much time on internet forums. No one will ever really know if CANONs are better than NIKONs, and if FX is better than DX, merely because there is no such thing as a better picture than another. It's all in the eyes of the watcher, his personal history and his mood and feelings. So if you know what message you want to shout to the world and if your eyes are well trained to work with your heart and your brain, you'll be very likely to shoot some magnificent series with a single-use camera, while your neighbor is just pulling some flatness out of his Kodak Portra 160 loaded Leica M6. Yes, here is the hard truth: it is the photographer who makes the picture, not his camera.
And here comes the paradox: yet, equipment is very important. But not in an obvious way. Equipment is important because it is the extension of your allmighty trilogy: guts-heart-brain. Your gears, if well chosen, will either let you click what you have in mind or let you follow your instinct. That's why I'm a gears geek. Careful! I'm not a technogeek, and certainly not a performance geek. To me performance meens nothing. Modern cameras are performing way beyond our mere human abilities (and they've been doing so for a long time now). My set of cameras can already be considered "old". I've got two Nikons, a D300 and a D3. They may be from the last decade but they also happen to be my daily rides for professional purposes. And let me say worse: most of my lenses are from the last century!
So what's wrong with me? Nothing. My equipment is just perfectly fulfilling my needs. 12 Mpix are way enough to get wall sized printouts. So when most of my work ends up in magazines or web sites, why would I stuff my hard drives up with images that are three times that size? Besides, these camera bodies are flawless in terms of light metering, focusing accuracy and shadow / light dynamic range (the three most important things for a camera body to me). Since I've been using them, these two cameras have become the end of my arms. Now the only thing I need to complete that enhaced body with is a proper eye that sees what I want, and sees it the way I want.
I have tried many modern lenses. Nikkor AFDX 17-55 f/2.8 ED, 70-200 VR, etc. They are very impressive. They are fast, sharp, sturdy and reliable. I'd definitely reach out for them anytime I'm requested for studio works that need crispy details and accurate color matches (like catalog stuff). But most of the time I'm asked to show or depict a particular atmosphere. And that's what I love to do. More than showing what's in front of the lens, I love to show the mood of the moment. But for that puprose, modern lenses are rubbish, they just are too good and precise. Therefore, to me a sunday flee market, a used photo equipment fair, or the second hand section of a camera store are always the best places to find my gears.
Old lenses are imperfect. I'm imperfect too. And all these imperfections are the best things to use in order to make an image tell a story, because such an image is as much about what we can see as about what we can't. So I need shadows, I need flare, I need soft focus, I need bokeh, I need warm or cold tones. I know, I could do all these things in a software but, sorry, I'm oldschool. I'd rather being out there shooting than sitting at my desk.
So that's how I ended up filling my bag with loads of old pieces of glass. Among them is this 1979 Nikon E Series 50 mm f/1.8, for which I did spend an incredible amount of money: 60 € (along with a mint Nikon EM body, which has become my favorite camera, by the way, but that's another story). I never really had an opportunity to use this lens on my D3, so today I decided to give it a try. I set Nik (my D3's little nickname) on A, 200 ISO and all the rest is about rotating the focusing and the aperture rings. Bliss.
I let you have a look at the result. I did process the images a bit, using Lightroom and VSCO film presets. Now this is another very cool combination that comes as a perfect fine tuning device for the kind of images I like to make. But, still I insist: the better photos I get on the field the better images I'll get in the end. So, post process's just the icing on the cake. Anyway, another interesting point to discuss, we'll talk about it another time.
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Nikon D3 + Nikon Series E 50 mm f/1.8
1/4000 - f/2 - ISO 200 |
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Nikon D3 + Nikon Series E 50 mm f/1.8
1/200 - f/5.6 - ISO 200 |
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Nikon D3 + Nikon Series E 50 mm f/1.8
1/1600 - f/1.8 - ISO 200 |
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Nikon D3 + Nikon Series E 50 mm f/1.8
1/2000 - f/2.8 - ISO 200 |
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Nikon D3 + Nikon Series E 50 mm f/1.8
1/800 - f/5.6 - ISO 200 |
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Nikon D3 + Nikon Series E 50 mm f/1.8
1/320 - f/1.8 - ISO 200 |
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Nikon D3 + Nikon Series E 50 mm f/1.8
1/80 - f/1.8 - ISO 400 |
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Nikon D3 + Nikon Series E 50 mm f/1.8
1/80 - f/1.8 - ISO 400 |
Alright. Sharpness is not top notch and certainly not at the level of a modern 50 mm f/1.4 (although I've been really surprised at f/5.6 and f/8). The centre of the image is always very decent but the corners are a lot weaker. Chromatic abberation is a lot less than I expected and flare is beautiful althought a little too discrete for my taste. In conlclusion, I'd definitely use this lense for relaxed series in natural light, especially for back light portraits (with a sort of hippie-1970s-peace&love touch). The softness of focus at wide aperture (from f/1.8 to f/4) and its good contrast also make it a good one to use for black and white purposes. So I'll sure keep it in my bag (anyway, it's really small and light, although very well assembled), and I'll keep haunting my local dealer's used section!
The following article is the same in French but the photos are different, so feel free to browse it.
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