Afewimages: Black and white fine art photography

I just exchanged my Nikon 1.4/85mm for a brand new Carl Zeiss Planar 2.0/100mm zf.2. What an amazing piece of art this lens is! It’s heavy but so beautiful finished. All metal and glass. No comparison with the plastic Nikon i had.

I have alway read the articles by Diglloyd about Carl Zeiss lenses and his experiences and great written user tests with the 100mm Planar made me want this lens for a long time. So finally i decided to buy it and here you’ll see some first examples.

The first thing i noticed is the very narrow depth of field when shooting at F2 or F2.8. My Nikon D700 has a full frame sensor and this make things even trickier. The macro images are shot with the camera on a tripod. Sharpening the normal way looking through the viewfinder. Results on almost every image was oke. The focal point is where it is intended to be. The other images are shot by hand in the field and the subjects further away from the camera, from about 3 mtrs until infinity. In these images the focal point is not always where i thought it should be. A bit more capture sharpening in ps will ‘rescue’ these images but it is not perfect.

When is saw these results i was a bit disappointed. I did a final test at home shooting with and without a tripod. And indeed, just a minor move, back- or forwards, ensures that the focal point is not where you want it to be. Risky if you want to shoot portraits with the lens wide open!

Another thing i discovered is that i had to adjust the viewfinder to correct the shortcomings of my eyes on short distances! Sharpening was much easier and more precise when i did this. Never thought of this.

The information diglloyd gives on this issue is clear. My Nikon has the possibility to use Liveview
With liveview you can zoom in on the subject for precise sharpening. Next time i am going to use this feature. It is obvious that you can only use liveview on static subjects. My trees are very static so for me this is not an issue.

I have included 100% crops so you can see that sharp is indeed real sharp (the right focal point) Even without pre (capture) sharpening the results are already stunning. For comparison there are also some crops which are pre sharpened in ps. I don’t use any sharpening when shooting, i leave it all to ps to do the job. Only the farmhouse is taken at F5.6, the other images at F2 or F2.8.