Leaving work today, I walked outside and the clouds… oh my, the clouds.
I pulled the D7000 out of the bag and started shooting.
I took the long way to the car.
D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO100, 1/8000th, f/1.4 (yes, I should’ve stopped down, way down. Oh well. By the time I realized it, I was getting ready to post this…).
Got home a bit early today, and so I took the reversed 75-150 for a walk around the apartments. This is the best shot I got, though I was shooting more to test the performance characteristics of a reversed 75-150mm E Series in the wild than to make a competent photo.
I tried to take some pictures of clouds, but to my surprise, clouds are only about 3/4 of the way to infinity, and it was very difficult to focus on them at f/8 with the rather diffuse and low-contrast light about. If I was smart, I would’ve switched to the live view. Alas.
D7000. 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, Reversed. ISO1600 (lemme go change that before I forget, again), 1/4000th (AP mode), f/8, -2ev (because the D7000 likes to overexpose in AP mode, especially with non-CPU and non-Nikkor lenses, though I probably could’ve gotten away with -1ev, since I just added in full stop of exposure in post…).
Question: Why is there a tilt-shift type effect going on here?
I’m probably going to take the 75-150mm E Series to the Arboretum for a meetup on Saturday, and I’m probably going to take it reversed, with ~30mm of extension tubes on the end as a sort of lens hood.
An interesting thing about reversing a zoom lens: you can focus to (with the 75-150) 1:1.5 at 16″ and you can also focus to infinity. But the depth of field is much narrower at all distances.
Anyway. I took this shot of the pool part of the fountain just to shoot something, and it was the last shot I took before I ran back inside.
Notice how the center is in relatively sharp focus, but the edges are beautifully soft.
Why is this?
Is it the curvature of the rear lens element? Is it something about the physics of light and reversing lenses? Is it something to do with the aperture (f/5.6 here: I was trying to shoot ants prior to this (with no success), and didn’t ever go back to 3.5)?
Leave a comment if you have any thoughts, or hit me up on the contact me page.
D7000. Nikon 75-150mm E Series, Reversed. ISO1600 (to give faster shutter speeds), 1/2000th (selected by the camera, AP mode), f/5.6.
Once again, no details, as I’m still working out what’s going on, what I’m doing, and what this is all about…
Whatever it is, it’s lots of fun!
No details on this one just yet… I need to do some counting and figuring, but I’ll let you know what’s up by week-end.
And another one that I want to see printed BIG. Oh what fun things you can make with a couple of flashlights and some coffee stirrer things that will one day become a gridspot for the SB700 (maybe later today, but probably not).
D7000, 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, Reversed. ISO100, 1″, f/16.
Well I was all set to do another Super Macro Bros. shoot (and did, in fact, shoot about 300 pictures with one or another or both of the brothers, and all of their siblings), and had designs on some more HDR for no good reason, but there was just one problem…
Somehow, in changing lenses today, I got about 100000000 specks of dust on the sensor. Either that, or I was shooting light colors with too narrow an aperture or something, because I couldn’t get a shot that wouldn’t take 2 hours to clone dust out of.
So I spent 6 hours shooting, and another hour researching sensor cleaning methods before I remembered that I actually needed to shoot for the 365…
And so we have this shot.
Fun times.
D7000, 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, reversed, on 48mm of extension tubes. ISO100. 3 exposures: 2″ at f/16, 1″ at f/8, 1/4 second at f/3.5, and lots of playing in Aperture.
