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Rainy Day at 35mm 1.4

35mm 1.4

My nieces and nephews (and their parents) have a unique advantage: ample camera practice before family portrait season even rolls around. Me? I have eleven (local) built-in models who are (slowly!) learning to ask for a photo (and then begging to see all the images). When nephew Isaiah had a birthday bonfire in the rain, what else was I to do than lead exploratory missions through the forest and carry my camera along? I didn’t have a choice, obviously: photo time!

(Plus, I had just received my brand new Nikon 35mm 1.4; all those built-in models were calling my name quite literally!)

In this single rainy evening, I fell in love with the 35mm beast.  I immediately realized that this lens is fast, it’s sharp, it’s wide but not too wide, it’s versatile but not too heavy, it’s got the most dreamily shallow depth of field, and it’s a lens I should’ve purchased about three years ago.  I notice very little distortion when taking portraits; it does distort at the edges in close quarters, but not as much as my now-deceased Sigma 24mm 1.8.  When setting the aperture to the max f/1.4, the auto focus does occasionally take a few tries to lock in on a (moving) subject but we are talking high-energy preschoolers here. 😉

All told, buying the Nikon 35mm 1.4 was potentially a brilliant decision. Taking it to a rainy day picnic was definitely brilliant.

A good majority of these photos were taken at the widest-possible (for a Nikon) f/1.4 on a rainy and gray evening and one-click processed with VSCO’s  Kodak Gold 100 in Lightroom.  Have you seen my before-and-after review of VSCO Pack 01? These presets are changing the way I walk the post-process road.








35mm 1.4



35mm 1.4







35mm 1.4

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