Nikon Z7
Nikkor Z 50mm S f/1.2
50mm, 1/200 Sec at f/8, ISO64
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom Classic V11.4.1
Photo of the Month – September
a life well lived and appreciated
We went up into Lincoln, to the cathedral, to pay our respects and see the flowers and notes left by people for our late Queen.
The boring 50mm lens
Most of us photographers use zooms, for a lot of my professional work I use zooms. When shooting a wedding its generally a 24-70mm f/2.8 on one body and a 70-200mm f/2.8 on another, with a fast 50mm in the bag for when the light levels drop.
Sometimes for personal work I use a simple Leica with either a 35mm f/2 or 50mm f/1.4, I also sometimes adopt that simple approach when using my high resolution Nikon Z7 for portraits, using the Nikkor Z 50mm f/1.2 and Z 35mm f/1.8.
This simple image was just with my Nikon Z7 and a 50mm f/1.2 wide open. A simple but very pleasing portrait.
My Queen
For many of us, in the UK, Canada and Australia, and the other Commonwealth realms she headed. She was the only head of state we have every known.
She was not known as a photographer, but often carried her little Leica with her on state visits. Documenting the many people and places she visited.
Whether you are a republican or monarchist we can say she dedicated her life to service.
Where I live she visited in 1978 where we got a glimpse of the queen. Years later I had the privilege of photographing her son the then Prince of Wales. There was a bunch of us photographers trying to get the image we wanted, and he knew exactly what to do so we got the photographs we wanted. Those slides are currently in the archive of our local paper.
The Queen will be missed, she served her people well and now that responsibility falls on her son.
Rest our Queen, and long live the King
System Cameras and third party support – Canon
Sony reached their current status by embracing third parties, it took a while but now we have lens, flashes etc available from a broad range of suppliers.
Sony and Fuji, and the L alliance with Leica, Panasonic together with Olympus have very large well established systems.
Canon and Nikon are the new kids on the block for mirrorless. While both are the joint kings of the SLR realm and have been since the 1960’s, they are new to high end mirrorless and are building their systems quickly. There has been a lot of chat about whether these will remain closed systems or welcome third parties.
Well now it seems we know. Canon have issues legal notices to a number of lens manufacturers to stop them from producing lens for the RF mirrorless mount, while we see the first authorised lens from Tamron for Nikon, and we see Nikon executives, carrying the little Zfc with cute Voigtlander primes on the front.
I feel this is sending the wrong signal from Canon, whilst their high end L glass for the new mount has been good the rest is certainly not near the quality of the Nikon Z S branded glass, or Sony’s G and GM glass. Certainly if I was getting into photography now for full frame I would look at Nikon and Sony not Canon. If you have the budget then go Canon for the rest of us Sony have the bigger range and Nikon are knocking it out of the park with their Z lens. If you are into your cropped sensor then neither Nikon or Canon have much to offer from themselves and you are better off looking at Fuji.