The 35/1.8 still impresses

I am now officially divested of much of the extra camera equipment I’d been holding on to – the D3, 14-24, 70-200,  TC-20E II teleconverter, and SB-900 flash all made the trip back to Malaysia with my step-father, a professional photographer who will get a lot more out of the equipment than I will.  I’ll probably still eventually go full frame, perhaps when the D700 replacement becomes available – if it’s not too expensive/large, and offers the same benefits over my D7000 that the D700 did over the D90 back in the day.

Still, shooting with the very compact and inexpensive 35/1.8 a few weekends ago reminded me that in most conditions, you really need very little to get decent results.  This is my dad, grilling up some corn on the BBQ:

Yes, it’s a pretty boring background and not especially interesting in terms of composition, but it’s not actually that easy to get a candid shot of my Dad smiling! Here’s another shot of my step-brother Tim as we get ready to leave:

If I still had the 70-200/2.8 to lug around, sure, it would have been possible to get much more background isolation and better background blurring, but for under $200, it’s hard to complain about the 35/1.8. It’s also so compact that there really isn’t a good reason for anyone with a DX camera not to have one!

I haven’t been posting much recently, as it’s been very busy trying to make sure that everything is wrapped up with my current job, as well as preparing for the upcoming move. Somehow, for every thing we get done, it seems like we’re adding two more items to the list of things that need doing. So I may not be posting too often in the next little while, even though the whole process has generated quite a few stories that I’ll try and capture here before my mind loses them forever…