Nifty Fifty

I know I mentioned this before, but I’ll say it again now.Â I have too dang many lenses, and it’s cramping my style… or at least my creativity.Â That’s why I decided, the last time I went out on an Urban Explore, to limit myself to taking just a few with me.Â On top of that, I forced start the day off with one of my favorite, but oft neglected lenses: the Nifty Fifty!Â That’s right, the 50mm (in this particular case, the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 HSM, a great lens for detail shots.Â I keep forgetting how much I love this focal length, not to mention the creamy bokeh (that wonderful blur, for those not familiar with the term bokeh).Â For this particular photograph, I closed her down a bit from f/1.4 to f/2 to get just a touch more depth of field, and this is the result.Â I was REALLY quite pleased with all I was able to do with the Fifty (or Fiddy if you will), and I know I’ll have to take her out more often to keep the creative spark alive!

Awesome shot, dude! And I’m in the same boat with the 50mm…definitely need to put it to more use when out shooting.

Awesome detail and overall tone Jacques! I love my fiddy and it hardly comes off the camera these days!

I love this shot Jacques, really wonderful composition here. I found it to be a very expressive image full of emotion. Gotta love your Fiddy there my friend!

Thanks, guys! The more I think about how I used to shoot when I was a kid, with my Pentax K1000 and a 50mm lens almost exclusively, the more I want to go back to that simplicity. I’m actually considering a long-term project using just the 50mm and a 90mm to shoot everything. We’ll see, once I’ve had a chance to develop my ideas a bit more in that regard.

By the way, I let my daughter, who’ll turn 11 this April, have my D700 and my Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G (my other Fiddy), and she came back with some amazing shots. I set it to Aperture priroty, Auto ISO and f/2 before I handed it to her. Her compositions were really great, and I had given her no tips in that regard as I wanted her to shoot how she “sees” instead of how I “see”.

This shot is moody and fun. Nice job

Oh man this is so beautiful. Great comp, great color, great bokeh and you really evoked some emotion with that fifty. Truly inspiring.

Great shot here, nice stylish close-up composition and the dull coloration is wonderful. I like your idea to limit yourself, sometimes you can have too much choice. Whatever you do, keep on shooting. 🙂

Hey fellas; thanks! And you can bet your bottom pound sterling that I’ll keep on shooting, Dave. I may even take the Lensbaby out to play with it a bit as well, since it, too, is a 50mm lens.

Wonderful shot, Jacques, and an inspiration to me. I promised my self I would revisit some older shots. I think I now where to start.

sweet shot. love the tone of this image

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Nice DoF and processing – you should be very hiappy with this. I have a ‘Fiddy’ too, but its been superceeded by my 60mm macro, I should take it out for a spin again though, it’ll lighten my bag!

[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Chris Nitz, S C Moore, Toad Hollow, Jim Denham, Heath O'Fee and others. Heath O'Fee said: RT @fotofreq: New #photo and #blog post up, this one on shooting #urbex #hdr at Aylum 'T' with Nifty Fifty! http://bit.ly/e1ARMA <- Nice! […]