885 - The Beauty Of The Days Gone By

Here we are at the second part of my little review of the new Nikon AF-S DX 35/1.8G. Yesterday in the first part we have looked into sharpness, and there was certainly nothing to complain about.

The Image of the Day is actually one more exercise in sharpness. I have converted it with Adobe Camera RAW and then done my usual B&W treatment of lately. Don’t let the image fool you, there is no corner softness and no vignetting in the original, that was all made in Photoshop 🙂

For today I have promised to look into bokeh. We have already seen some in my night shot “880 - This Sad Burlesque”, that was wide open and with near point light sources, something where most lenses look good, but today it is a more interesting subject, a criss-cross of twigs, photographed at f1.8, f2.8, f4 and f8.

The thumbnails link to full-size images, so you better click on them. The last, f8, was taken at high ISO. I used Auto-ISO at a lower speed limit of 1/200s. Those little things move incredibly fast in the slightest wind, and I really wanted to get the sharp parts without motion blur.

Looks good to me. The Sigma 50/1.4 performs still better, but I can’t call this bokeh unpleasant. Not at all. On a scale from one to five with five best, I would call this a solid four.

Sharpness OK, bokeh fine, I guess we should look into CA tomorrow, shall we?

The Song of the Day is “The Beauty Of The Days Gone By” from Van Morrison’s 2002 album “Down the Road”. I didn’t find a video, but Deezer has it from some three CD collection “Still on Top: The Greatest Hits”. It’s track 12 on the third disk.