Saturday, October 11, 2008

spending an evening and a day in sac to test some location and lightning conditions for an upcoming shot.

Well that's the best I could do, since my own shadow kept popping into the picture at 10mm - 20mm. But I guess I'm not that mean to take pictures of a woman at 10mm anyway and rather at 35 - 90 - 200 mm.

Well the last two days I spend testing a 24mm F/2.8 lens AIS from a friend on a D80 body to see if it's good or not.

Well the conclusion is very simple, it's a pretty bad lens. Or at least the version I played with.

It is not a big deal to get the exposure right with a variation of +/- 0.25 stops on average. The test sample contained roughly 100 pictures and I tested it at different apertures. It performs ok at F/2.8, not thing to sing about, but if you manage to get the focus right, well it's fairly sharp. The out of focus rendering is not that great and actually pretty ugly.
The diffraction limit kicks in around F/11 and I did not bother to test it at much lower apertures, since the results were just soft and fuzzy, at least on my D80. It also suffers pretty badly from CA (purple/blue), which is easily corrected, but still annoying.
If you shoot directly into the lens, well you get all kind of fancy flare, so it's a big no.

What else can I say, look at the pictures which are all straight out of camera and shot in raw. ISO was around 320 for most of these shots, since I had no tripod handy and they were slightly cropped.