I bought a converter to use my old Nikkor f-mount lenses on my fuji x-t50 a little while ago, and since the f-mount lenses are plentiful and solid, I’ve known I’d be picking up a few more in future for a while – it was just a matter of meeting the right lens, as they say.
So I went with Matt to Camerama last week for an hour or so, and came away with this treasure:
It’s the right era to work on my Nikkormat FT-2 film camera as well, which is a delight!
It’s a VERY hazy and soft lens, though it can be crisp when it chooses to. The decent aperture means it’s very fun for night and low-light scenarios, too!
Unfortunately it does have some meaningful coating damage to the front element, which while almost invisible wide open, can become very obvious as soft spots when you dial the aperture up past f8.
That means this will never be the infinite focus wide angle of my landscape dreams, which is a blow, but on the other hand it is extremely fun to use wide open, so I think I’ll survive!
And if I really, really love this focal length, then I know to keep an eye out for similar in something with some autofocus capacity in future! (all the nikkor lenses are manual focus, as my ft-2 is just that old.)
Here’s a couple unprocessed snaps from the past few days of playing with it:
I didn’t know what people meant about loving specific bokeh before, but, this lens definitely is doing something special with it and I really love the look!
I’m not really sure how I want to process these, actually! They have a lot of flavour of their own and so far my post-processing adventures aren’t really unlocking anything else yet, but here, some experiments with contrast, colour and sharpening so far:
I think this is going to be an extremely fun lens to have on hand for dramatic lighting scenarios, especially low-light ones, and I am definitely bringing it to my next karaoke night! I also def wanna do some portrait experiments with it, though that will definitely rely on carefully managing The Smear so as not to warp anyone’s faces. Either way, a very fun new tool and something that feels extra timely as the days get shorter and more of my photography time will be in the dark.
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