In my last post I talked about a scouting run I’d made in Córdoba, Spain, to find a location I’d be going back to at sunset. Well, I obviously didn’t walk all the way there and back without taking any other photos. The afternoon turned into a nice, relaxing photo walk. A great way to start a trip.
The shot I was scouting looked like it would require a short telephoto so I decided to go with only my Nikon D850 and my Rokinon 85mm lens. I took nothing else but my phone — but phones are capable-enough cameras these days that if I saw something I needed a wide shot of, I wouldn’t go lacking.
The 85mm turned out to be a great choice.
My typical walk-around lenses are zooms. Either my 17-35mm or my 70-200mm Nikkors. They offer lots of flexibility but they’re big, heavy and have apertures of f/2.8. They also tend to attract a lot of attention. The 85mm is manual focus which helps make it smaller and lighter. It’s also faster at f/1.4 so it’s great for getting shallow depth of field and blurring backgrounds. One of the reasons I purchased this particular Rokinon was the creamy background blur it could achieve. With shallow depth of field, I tend to like to focus manually anyway. It slows me down a bit and makes me more intentional in my choices.
The Rokinon 85mm is sharp where you want it sharp, and beautifully soft where you want it soft. As in the shot of the statue of St. Raphael on the bridge above (click on it to see it slightly larger), that softness in the background helps separate the subject — the statue — from the busy architecture in the background.
As shown by this shot of some plates on display on a shop wall, it’s also a great lens for capturing details and cropping out a lot of the surrounding distractions in a scene:
When I did see a shot where I thought I might want a more wide-angle view (like this vertical scene with the horse), I shot multiple horizontal frames and stitched them together as a vertical panorama in Lightroom. This had the advantage of also letting me get the shallow depth of field that would have been impossible with my 17-35mm f/2.8.
This particular image (you can click it to see it larger) was made from seven horizontal frames, starting with the tower tips and gradually panning down until I had the horses hooves and street pavement. I probably didn’t need all seven photos, but I took a couple of extra frames in the section where the people were so that I was sure I had all the moving elements in a single frame. Stitching the pano would have been more challenging if the people were cut off at the waist from one frame to the next. It’s always good to have plenty of overlap between frames, but keeping moving objects all in one frame is also important.
I really like this Rokinon 85mm lens. It’s so light and compact that I don’t mind carrying it for long periods of time. The ability to get shallow depth of field and really smooth out-of-focus areas also contributes to some very three-dimensional looking images. When everything is sharp, there’s no depth. A little bit of blur to separate your subject from the foreground and background elements helps you see a more dimensional scene. The waiters above is a good example. The shot would still work if it were all in focus, but the slight blurring of everything but the waiters helps to let you know that they are the subject of the photo.
Zoom lenses are great and I still use them often, but prime lenses (of a single focal length like 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, etc.) have a real advantage in that they can often have much wider apertures than the f/2.8 that you tend to find in pro-level zooms.
In my experimentation with the Fujifilm system (which I’ll talk about more later) I’m so far sticking exclusively to prime lenses. No zooms. With Fujis having smaller APC sensors, prime lenses can be absolutely tiny, too, which is really appealing to me. Not only for less to carry, but to be less noticeable on the street.
If you don’t have one, pick up a fast prime lens for your camera and see how it changes what images you can make. I think you’ll enjoy the exercise.
