Photography Journal

Hot Coffee, Mississippi

2010-04-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

I drove over to Hot Coffee, Mississippi this morning to shoot these images of signs for a request posted on a stock photography site that I am a member of. The request was for official signs at the entrance to more than a dozen such towns with unusual names. Hot Coffee just happened to be one, and just happened to be near enough for me to run over and get these. Both were shot with the Rokinon 85mm f1.4 manual focus lens described in the previous post.

There's not much to Hot Coffee these days, just a couple of signs on the road and this old abandoned store located in "Downtown" Hot Coffee.

Rokinon 85mm f1.4

2010-04-11T12:10:00.000-07:00

One new lens I've picked up recently that is quickly becoming a favorite is the Rokinon 85mm f1.4. I first heard about this lens in a post on the Nikon Cafe Forum, under the name of Samyang 85mm f1.4. The Samyang is a Korean-made manual focus 85mm f1.4 lens that is also sold under other names such as Rokinon and Vivitar. I ordered the Rokinon version after reading many extremely positive reviews, and I am well pleased with the results. The bokeh rendered by the shallow depth of field at f1.4 is fantastic.

This series of a cat lounging on the shiny roof of a car demonstrates the bokeh quite well. The car was inside a garage with white painted drywall. All shots were wide open at f1.4. I don't mind having to manual focus, as this lens is $250 compared to Nikon's autofocus version which retails for $1200.

Nikon 300mm f4 AF-S

2010-03-23T06:38:00.000-07:00

For a couple of years my longest focal-length lens was the excellent Nikon 70-300mm VR. I recently started looking into options for a longer focal length as well as better I.Q. at 300mm, and my research led me to the Nikon 300mm f4 AF-S, which is a prime, instead of a zoom, and is proven performer with teleconverters, especially 1.4 teleconverters, which change the focal length to 420mm. I found a used copy through the Nikon Cafe forum, and it has since become one of my favorite lenses.

Here's one of the first shots I took with it, out in the backyard near the bird feeder the day it arrived on the UPS truck:

Since it has a constant wide-open aperture of f4, this lens will be more useful in a wider range of conditions than the f4.5 to f5.6 aperture of the 70-300mm VR zoom. The 300 f4 is a reasonable compromise between slower consumer zooms and the really high-dollar stuff like the 300 f2.8 VR, which is nearly five times the cost.

Red Wasp at 420mm

2010-03-20T17:21:00.000-07:00

I've just recently picked up a used example of the Nikon 300mm f4 AF-S telephoto. This is a great lens for nature photography, and is even pretty good at insect close-ups. For this photo I added the Kenko Pro 300 1.4 TC, which increases the focal length of the 300mm f4 to 420mm. This was at minimum focusing distance, and as you can see the depth of field is very shallow.