Nikon Showcase Post Nikon Df Photos

I wish it was something we rarely saw here in SE Pennsylvania Dan. At least this winter, snow and icicles have lost all of their charm. A few more this morning while the snow is still arguably pretty, before it all turns to overwhelming piles of grey slush...

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More snow-13-Edit-2 by ramboorider1, on Flickr

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More snow-26-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

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More snow-61-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

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More snow-28-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

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More snow-72-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

-Ray

Love the first and third shots and I feel you Ray. I think you have gotten more snow there than we have here in Iowa but man I'm so sick of it. Ready for warm, beautiful weather!
 
I thought I would get around to posting my review of this camera, but I finally decided that I am not a camera reviewer.
So I will simply say I love using this camera. It has a few quirks that take getting use to, but once you do that it is dream come true for long time Nikon users who have hoarded manual focus lenses since way back when...
Fun is the key word here. IQ is the best yet for me.
Here is a recent image. Caught the TARDIS before it dematerialized for the new Doctor Who...

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Tardis on Table by donlaw200, on Flickr
 
The one lens I still haven't locked down for the Df is a longer portrait lens, along the lines of the Olympus 75mm for m43. Something in the 135-150 range. I have the 85mm f1.8, which is a nice shorter portrait length, and the long end of the 24-120 f4 has been OK, but something in the 135-150mm range is definitely on my radar. Nikon has a nice 135 f2.0 and 180 f2.8, both AF-D lenses but neither with image stabilization of any type. I shot briefly with the 180 and really felt I needed VR (vibration reduction?) with that long a lens. I'm not sure I'd need it with the 135 f2.0, but I figure the 120mm f4 that I already have in the zoom is probably about as useful since it has very effective VR that allows me to to probably more than compensate for the two stop slower lens. There's a Sigma 150mm f2.8 macro that's a possibility but that thing is a TANK and I've read some pretty sketchy stuff about it's AF and bokeh, so not sure I want to go there for a portrait lens. There are rumors of a new Sigma 135 f1.8 with VF that I'd like to check out before I put any serious money into anything in this focal length.

But I've been so enamored of the Zeiss 21mm manual focus lens that I recently found that I thought I should check out MF at 135 and see if I could cope with it for the type of candid portraits I tend to use this focal length for. So I checked out ebay and there are tons of 135mm AI and AIS Nikon lenses, with models at both f2 and f2.8. Clean versions of the f2.0 lenses are up in the $400-500 range, though, while the f2.8 versions were more like $100-200. Since I'm far from sure how much of a keeper this was gonna be anyway, I decided to buy an f2.8 version advertized in mint condition for $150. It showed up yesterday and it's actually a really nice lens, and quite small too, for this focal length on a full frame camera. I'll have to find out over the holidays, when we have a lot of people around, how well I'm gonna do with manual focus at this focal length for candid portraits. Where people sometimes, you know, MOVE around! But just playing around with it around the house, I'm loving this little lens. It really was in mint condition too, with a serial number that indicates it's from around 1978 or 1979...

Not sure how I'd have liked this lens on a higher res camera like the D610 or D800, but it plays to the strengths of the Df...

Here's a shot OF the lens and a few taken with it:

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135 tests-1 by ramboorider1, on Flickr

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135 tests-3-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

View attachment 98171135 tests-24-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

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135 tests-10-Edit-2 by ramboorider1, on Flickr

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135 tests-19-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

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135 tests-16-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

-Ray
 
ray are you using the 'green dot' to manual focus, or just the naked eye? my hesitation on this camera is lack of focus aids...

Hi Tony,

With this lens, I'm mostly just going by eye, but while I'm doing that I can see the green arrows and dot out of the corner of my eye and it seems like my eye and the green dot are always in agreement. Both of my other MF lenses are very wide angle - 14mm Rokinon and 21mm Zeiss - and the DOF tends to be so wide I just check the green dot and figure it'll be close enough - it can also be harder to focus by eye with such deep DOF and more distant subjects. But with this 135, it hasn't been a problem at all.

There's NO electronic connection between this lens and the Df, so I wasn't even expecting the green dot to work. But you create lens profiles for your "non-CPU" lenses, tell it the focal length and the maximum aperture and then the camera will be able to follow your aperture changes and show them to you in the viewfinder and the little info screen on the top of the camera. I guess the focus dot is independent of that, using the PDAF sensor in the camera to calculate focus the same way it does with AF lenses - it just can't move the lens to focus it based on the information, but it has all of the same data coming in. It's kind of funny - the Rokonon claims it contains a Nikon "focus confirmation chip", ostensibly to work with the green dot. The Zeiss doesn't say that anywhere but, like the Rokinon, it has electronic contacts to communicate SOMETHING to the camera. But the 135 AI doesn't have ANY kind of electronics on-board and it seems to behave exactly the same as the two lenses with electronic contacts. The only difference I can see is that I had to enter the data into a lens profile one time with the 135, and I guess I'll have to select the right profile manually if I ever add another non-CPU lens to the stable.

I don't know that I'd buy this camera to use exclusively with MF lenses, but then I wouldn't buy ANY camera to use exclusively with MF lenses. But for having a few MF lenses among the AF stuff, I haven't found it any problem at all...

-Ray

And, of course, if you're shooting something pretty deliberately, you can switch to live view and magnify the hell out of the image, so you can definitely fine tune focus with that if you're not happy with your eye or the green dot.
 
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