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Portrait of a lens: NIKKOR-O Auto 1:2 f=35mm

Sigfrid Lundberg's Stuff 2010-10-29

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This is a portrait of a lens I've kept since I was a teenager. You can see it in an earlier entry. There are quite a few web sites from Nikon F aficionados, such as Richard de Stoutz' Nikon F Collection & Typology who owns an almost complete series of the lens and experienced professional users such as Bjørn Rørslett. who owns some 100 lenses and give ratings a lot of them, including Nikon F wide angle ones. This particular lens gets rating 5 for for traditional use with film and 4 otherwise. 5 is the highest rating and means:

Brugmansia suaveolens
Brugmansia suaveolens by Sigfrid Lundberg, on Flickr

I took this photo of Angel's trumpet, Brugmansia suaveolens, in the garden of Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. This plant is as beautyful as it is extremely poisonous.

Excellent. Use such lenses as often as possible and let other people wonder about the quality you can achieve with them.

The rating 4 means Very good, quality results can be expected. Such lenses can safely be applied to professional photography. I leave it to Bjørn, Richard and others to achieve the quality people will wonder about. A lens is an artist's tool, and the quality of the result depends on his or her skills.

Be that as it may; a survey on eBay shows that you can get one of these for between $20 and $100, depending on whether the previous owners have used it as often as possible or not. If you're lucky and get it from someone who didn't understand just how good this lens is, then it is a bargain. Promise.

PA202467.JPG
PA202467.JPG by Sigfrid Lundberg, on Flickr

The bar in The Old Bull's pub in Lund. Taken hand-held late in the evening, with the aperture wide open.

Initially, I found it extremely hard to focus this lens. The first time I felt that I got almost right was when I took the photo the Angel's trumpet. The lens has a minimum distance of less than 30cm so you can use it for macro photography. And as you can see, it has a nice bokeh with the aperture wide open.

PA202470.JPG
PA202470.JPG by Sigfrid Lundberg, on Flickr

Taken hand-held on my way home from the Old Bull. The lens is wide open and it is night and the first winter mix is falling.

The lens is fast, if not ultra-fast. I mean it isn't Noctilux 50mm f0.95 at $10,000, Voigtlander Nokton 50mm f1.1 or even any of all the f1.4 around.

The speed of the lens makes the depth of field quite small, and that does actually make it easier to focus. Just focus wide open¸ and then lessen aperture to something where your target is sharp. Then you get nice images for around $50.

PA212483.JPG
PA212483.JPG by Sigfrid Lundberg, on Flickr

This is an early morning in my life as an international commuter. It happens now and then that the train from Lund to Copenhagen is cancelled from Malmö. Then you have to wait for the next train from Lund to Malmö and spend twenty minutes philosophizing around this special case of the theodicé problem: How can there exist a good God, when I could have stayed in another twenty minutes in bed.

Since you cannot go to bed you can just as well just look across the channel, towards the old city of Malmö. Which is, quite nice. Why not take a photograph of it?

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My name is Sigfrid Lundberg. The stuff I publish here may, or may not, be of interest for anyone else.

On this site there is material on photography, music, literature and other stuff I enjoy in life. However, most of it is related to my profession as an Internet programmer and software developer within the area of digital libraries. I have been that at the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen (Denmark) and, before that, Lund university library (Sweden).

The content here does not reflect the views of my employers. They are now all past employers, since I retired 1 May 2023.

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This entry (Portrait of a lens: NIKKOR-O Auto 1:2 f=35mm) within Sigfrid Lundberg's Stuff, by Sigfrid Lundberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.