Photo Of The Day – Mr. Nikon goes to f/1.2

This past weekend I photographed another travel wedding, in Joy’s hometown. (Visalia) A friend in the area owns the rare and elusive Nikon 50mm f/1.2 AIS, so I borrowed it and used it for a couple shots. WOW, it is a beautiful lens! However, manually focusing at f/1.2 is pretty difficult; so it’s really for details and posed portraits only. For real photojournalism, I’ll stick with the much faster (and lighter, and smaller) 50mm f/1.4’s that have autofocus. Rumor has it that Nikon is working on a new 50mm f/1.2 with autofocus, but my personal decision is to save up for a 35mm f/1.4 instead. The AIS manual focus one is not that expensive, ($600 used) …and unfortunately the AFS one is at least $1K more. I’ll decide which to buy after more personal testing. For now, this camera geek is just happy to have held and created images with, well, one of Nikon’s mythical beasts. :-P (Thanks, Forrest!)

Take care,
=Matt=