Another beautiful day, another walk around the area. Today I walked 20,000 steps in the warm spring sun along the prom, beach and river (different river to yesterday). I took a group of friends on this little adventure, and of course took a few images too!
All images are straight from camera, and for a change (after a little conversation and thought talking to my friend Marc), I shot these images at F/7.1 instead of my very often F/1.8 that I use. Call it an experiment! All images have just been cropped to 5:4 ratio.
I know a lot of people who dislike images straight from camera, and always feel the need to edit images, or comment that they should not be straight from camera, as the camera colour profile decides the look. Yes, it does, but as always, I do not just shoot a straight colour profile, I tweak it, and this one is one I use a lot, as the tweaks make the images look really nice.
Anyway, we are almost halfway through the month of only using the 85mm lens, and I am building up a lot of thoughts about it. As a focal length that I almost exclusively use only for portraits, this little project has been great in making me understand the lens and focal length much more than ever.
Stay tuned for more! There is plenty more to come.
One Camera One Lens Photography 
Great photos. Don’t see any reason to edit. Thanks much for sharing.
i always learn from yours.
My “thing” is being a botanical macrophotographer. My primary interest is of bryophytes. There are some great macro photographers out there.
https://bryophytes.myportfolio.com/work
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Thank you very much, and I intend to get (yet another) macro lens this summer once I’ve got myself a Nikon ZF to go with my current camera for weddings/events etc.
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Are you going to have a chance to muse more in writing about your kit and the 85mm lens? Shorter? Longer? Etc
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Are you going to have a chance to muse more in writing about your kit and the 85mm lens? Shorter? Longer? Etc
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Are you going to have a chance to muse more in writing about your kit and the 85mm lens? Shorter? Longer? Etc
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Are you going to have a chance to muse more in writing about your kit and the 85mm lens? Shorter? Longer? Etc
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I’ll be doing a full “thoughts” blog at the end of the month on how it’s been just using the 85mm for work and play, yes.
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Hey Mark,
I think I expressed myself poorly the first time — the Viltrox 85mm is indeed a very sharp lens, but wide open, even the most expensive lenses tend to have a kind of creamy sharpness — not in the center, but everything outside of it. For model portraits, that can be fantastic, but out in the field it’s more about isolating the subject, and in that case, an aperture of f/2.2 to f/2.8 can make a noticeable difference.
That said, even at f/7.1, this lens still isolates well — probably also because it’s full-frame. That’s something that’s hard to match on the smaller sensors.
As for straight out of camera, I love shooting RAW, but whether you’re using an in-camera profile or fine-tuned settings like you do, camera JPEGs are sometimes so good that it’s actually hard to match them in post. That’s probably also why I still often shoot JPEG + RAW. The out-of-camera JPEG can be good enough — or even better — in many (maybe most) cases. Only when you want to recover something from the shadows, or get creative, there’s nothing better than RAW.
So let them talk — your out-of-camera JPEGs are perfect!
Another beautiful series, Mark!
All the best, Marc.
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Thank you Mark. Yeah, the main reason I could never go back to APSC or M/43 is the depth it field and the image quality these days. That’s just something magic about the “look” that full frame gives.
I did actually edit the first 4 or 5 images, before realising to myself that they didn’t need to be, so scrapped them and just used the jpegs.
Again, thank you very much 🙏
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whar is a viltrox or other.lens.equivalent to this 85mm compatible with MFT specifically an OM Systems OM,5?
thanks!
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A couple of friends of mine use the Olympus Zuiko 45mm F/1.8 which is similar in focal length and light gathering capabilities. Thank you.
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