A little joy.

Someone has painted these jolly faces on the wall of this long deserted laundry in a heavily Hispanic area of San Mateo. Guarded by a fence, I sneaked around the back and got up close and personal.

Taken on the Nikon D2x at ISO 100 with the 55mm Micro Nikkor, which makes for a 90mm focal length on the D2x’s APS-C sensor. This is a wonderful and very inexpensive portraiture and street combination. The ‘pro’ quality D2x may be ancient by digital standards, but remains better than 99% of the gear used by ‘serious’ digital snappers. Decent bodies can be found for under $600 and the Micro Nikkor I used here cost me $62 plus another $30 for the CPU. The D2x will outlive you, no matter how young you are.

Balmy Alley, off 24th Street.

Nikon D3x, 20mm UD Nikkor.

In Cypress Alley at 24th Street.

Nikon D3x, 20mm UD Nikkor. Snapseed effect.

The purpose of each pair of shoes is amusingly marked in chalk on the soles, something I did not spot until after importing the file into Lightroom.

On 24th Street.

A nice way to decorate a utility box.

Nikon D3x, 20mm UD Nikkor. You have to make crazy large prints and stick your nose in them to see the definition falling off toward the edges. Even then, the UD comfortably out resolves the latest 16-35mm f/4 AFS G IF zoom, which I just sold, owing to its poor ergonomics and vast bulk.

Off 24th Street.

Nikon D3x, 20mm UD Nikkor.

During the past three weeks I have featured images taken in San Francisco’s Mission District using the Nikon D3x full frame DSLR with the 20mm UD Nikkor lens, one which I first wrote about here. All of these were snapped in one afternoon. The UD Nikkor, an older lens, first sold in 1967, comes with very high quality construction and optics. It mates perfectly with the bulky full frame Nikon DSLR bodies, especially those with a built in vertical grip (D3, D4) or those which have had one added (D600, D700, D800). The balance on these is well nigh perfect and the electronic focus confirmation light makes focusing easy and fast.

If you can handle the limitations of Manual Focus – hardly that great in a 20mm lens with its great depth of field – this is an outstanding addition to any Nikon full frame outfit. VR is unnecessary in a lens this wide.

Use of this lens on an APS-C (D2x, D3000/5000/7000 etc.) body is pointless – you get all the bulk and weight of a full frame lens, but discard half the image, owing to the smaller sensor. Worse, you get an effective focal length of 32mm which is hardly what this optic is all about. If you want something this wide on APS-C, get a lens computed for that format of around 12-13mm focal length which will yield the same field of view as 20mm on full frame.