Lens Pairing

I somehow end up with a two lens, a sort of pairing when I am on an adventure with my camera. The farther I am from home increases the chance of a third lens, usually a wide angle prime. No, I’m not a professional photographer writing a “how to” piece. I write this for fun. For my own pleasure. Lenses to me are almost, if not more important than the camera itself. By no means am I suggesting you should do what I write here. Nothing like that, this is about what I do, what works for me.

I’ll start with my story and wrap it up with the pairings. If you want, you can skip this.

Like many of you, I started out with a prime lens, in my case the 50mm f1.8. A relatively fast normal view that could be used at any distance. I learned to focus, frame and compose with this lens. It is a, “do it all” lens however it’s a normal view. The way my pictures from a fifty millimeter turn out, it was just a way to capture what I saw in the way I see things.  At the time, I didn’t have any other lenses. I just didn’t know much about what I wanted other than a picture and that’s what I got. My old photo albums all have the same 50mm perspective. That camera/lens combo was economical and utilitarian, it became a one size fits all tool and I have no complaints about using it then but now I know better. The pictures produced got the job done pretty well way before smart phones and GoPro Hero cameras.

I grew up and began to understand the professional camera availability of lenses but not until recently have I began choosing lenses, purchasing and exploring perspective creativity.

As I return to photography, that 50mm lens is still in my kit. I use it for birthdays, family, house and pictures of my dog Lucy. It’s a family memory generator. I know a little more now about perspective and I choose a variety of lenses. There are so many available at nearly any price point. I can experiment with different lenses to get what I want out of the photo shoots I create for myself. 

The old fifty do it all technique, I now augment with a wide angle zoom. That’s an indoor family and architecture lens. I use a wide zoom all the time. It took me a while to divorce myself from the prime singularity. I see others married to prime lenses. They use depth of field, their legs and creative knowledge to capture subjects or views. If they need a long lens then they mount one. 

I choose Nikon and they have created a system, the F-mount. It is a forward and backward compatible lens mounting system able to use old lenses on new cameras and vice versa.  I use a variety of lenses to capture images pushing my subject back or bringing it closer or gathering wide like your eyes see but all in a picture you can easily take in without really moving your eyes. 

You should know what you want to see when using a prime, using your feet to zoom, framing the picture. The way I see it, once you release the shutter, even a zoom, a telephoto lens becomes a prime. It’s the way you got there that makes you a prime or a zoom lens photographer. Zoom lenses have had the luxury of time in development, there are a lot of really cool zooms out there as well as prime lenses.

Nothing wrong with a prime lens preference. Ultimately that’s how our eyes work and given two photographers with the same assignment, the prime guy and the zoom guy are both going to do great work.

It’s a choice.

Both are valid approaches.

I want choices when I create a photograph. When I am capturing a single photograph in time vs. recording video, the dynamic focal length of my zoom lens becomes a prime. Yes, I could have done it with a prime lens view, but I didn’t and it really doesn’t matter, this is how I do it, this is my perspective.

Looking at prime vs. zoom isn’t the way I do it. Unless we are animating our view, even the best zoom is a prime when we release the shutter and capture that moment in time.

I’ve said it a couple of different ways…

I have mentors, people that I look to for lessons. Ken Rockwell is one of those photographers that have taught me so much about photography, only secondary to my own doing. Ian Donald, and more recently, Russ Butner. They have helped me understand, virtually taken me under their wing. At a distance, I read their words, try to understand their perspective. I’m sometimes difficult, I don’t always listen but I do respect experience, especially my own.

When I craft the assignment, deciding what I want photograph, what I’m going to use, I draw from my kit. I shoot both digital and 35mm film. That’s my first decision. Sometimes I shoot both but that’s a rarity. What am I shooting for? Me. Myself. My blog. So, no pressure there. All for fun, like this piece I’m writing. 

…and why are you reading?

Probably because like me, you love photography and the people behind the lens are interesting. I have no interest in your money or your choices, there are no adds here, my blog isn’t monetized, I have my own money and I really don’t have any interest in persuading you to do anything. I’m no judge, this is about what I do. If you like what you read, what you see here and you have made it this far, photography is obviously our thing.

I have two cameras that I have built my lens collection around. The D780 and an F6. I chose Nikon for the F-mount system of attaching lenses to the camera. The F-mount has been Nikons way of creating camera equipment that is creative in old lenses being able to be used on new cameras and the other way around. Beyond that, I anchored my photography in film and then expanded into digital because film is expensive to experiment with. 

I built a lens kit for the F3 first exploring the world of manual focus AI-S (Automatic Indexing - Shutter) lenses in many different focal lengths. I wanted to understand what a lens could do. I mainly focused on prime lenses, single focal lengths yet I bought almost as many zoom lenses as well. These lenses are all metal, glass and paint. Beautiful old creations that just aren’t built anymore and when it comes to young photographers? I’ve yet to find any or even one that has one in their bag. The AI-S lenses are manually focused. The camera does not focus the lens, you do that. 

My eyes are good and the focus screen helps me to focus as sharply as I can yet sometimes I just didn’t capture the focus properly. I chose a too slow of a shutter speed or I moved the camera or a combination of each aspect.

Film is expensive, developing and scanning is expensive and so are my cameras and lenses. The development process is also susceptible to human error and the film lab I chose fucked up my film on more than one occasion. Going through all the motions, choosing a great lens, film and driving really far, hiking and finally getting the picture only to wait weeks in anticipation to see fluid streaks in my film?

I was so committed! That’s when I chose to shoot with a digital camera, a DSLR that would mount my beautiful manual focus lenses. New camera, old lenses… I started to understand the technology in my camera will really help create beautiful images. 

I entered the world of auto-focus.

Why in the world would I do that?

The two lenses I had were G (gelded) lenses, they didn’t even have an aperture ring. I could not use them effectively on my F3. But I bought them because it was so nice to get pictures that were fun to create and every single picture was in focus. And no developing costs.

I bought another DSLR as a back up to my D780, the D610. Quickly I oriented to it.

After using my auto focus lenses, from here forward I’ll write AF.

I sold ALL of my MF lenses ( manual focus = MF) and invested in a series of lenses built like AI-S lenses, glass, metal and very little plastic, I’ve heard them called, “crinkle finish lenses” because they are painted with a black crinkle finish and “built like a tank” because, compared to any other lenses, they are. The favorites have an actual aperture ring and options for manual focus. I had quite a budget from the sale and I promised myself, “just what you need” and I’ve been pretty true to that.

Now I’ll get to the gist of why I’m writing.

 Lately, my two lens pairing has been exaggerated by using a long lens to hunt for distant petroglyphs. Instead of walking and hunting down each section of cliff line or rock band, I will search with my long lens. If I can’t see anything but believe there is something there, I will take a picture for later and blow it up on the iPad searching virtually for rock art. At home I find things I could not see or had the energy to go explore. I search with my lens a second time at home. I’ve used a 500mm lens to search for small petroglyphs at distance up to and beyond three hundred feet.

I use an 80-400mm to search up to about three hundred feet.

That’s the beauty of the telephoto.

Now that I’ve found what I’m looking for in the field, I use a wide angle zoom to capture the detail in the close up photography.

The 20-35mm wide zoom to detail the close up. Or some variation of this depending on the characteristics of the lens I want to utilize the attributes of.

Again, It typically depends on the distances I am working with. I might use an 80-200mm for closer range, 50 to 100’ depending on the size of my subject and how I want to frame. For closer range up a 14-24mm lens if I want to get close and frame a lot of background around my target.

This weekend I’m going back to our farm and I want to get pictures of our fields, distances up to two miles all the way down to a close up of individual plant details. Pictures of old barns, farming equipment, people, a church, cemetery. I’ll bring three lenses, an 18mm for wide angle perspectives, a 24-120mm for people and buildings and again the 80-400mm for its variable zoom.

There are times in the past that I would use the kit killing AF-S Nikkor 28-300mm f3.5-5.6 G ED VR FX. In the desert, dusty climate I don’t want to change lenses, that lens really does it all. Or if I didn’t need detail at distance, I would use the 24-85mm. These are one lens solutions however, I might choose to again bring a wide zoom like the 14-24mm, the 20-35mm or even my 17-35mm. It depends which lens I wanted to work with.

Golfers have a saying, “drive for show, putt for dough.” I look at pairings like that. Although a good telephoto matters when I’m hunting for targets, it’s the close wide shots that I’m after.