Here is a slightly abstract shot of a plant I spotted at the Mt Cootha Botanic Gardens on Sunday. It was raining a little at the time, and you can make out the rain drops on the leaves.
I took this very quickly (it was raining on my remember) using the K200D and Jupiter-9 85mm f2.0 which was already mounted on the camera.
Almost no editing done here at all, just a slight crop
I am a little behind, but I hope to catch up this week. We have had rainy weather non stop for a couple weeks now. Yesterday I got out amongst the showers in the Mt Cootha Botanic Gardens, and in particular wanted to visit the Japanese Garden. You can read about the garden here.
Over the last week or so I’ve been discussing shooting in various different aspect ratios with a friend at work. He had the idea to shoot only in a particular aspect ratio for a bit. After this discussion I decided to copy his idea a little, and try shooting some stuff in the movie aspect ratio of 2.39:1 (my friend has decided on 16:9 btw). This is from my first shoot where I specifically considered shooting in this aspect. I dont plan on taking lots of shots in this aspect ratio, but it is fun to consider.
This is a Brenizer Panorama, taken with my Pentax K200D and Jupiter-9 85mm lens at f2.8. I stitched the shots using Autopano, then did some editing in Lightroom 2.5 to get the final result (crop, contrast, exposure, blacks)
Well its been raining since the beginning of the weekend here now (on and off raining anyway). Here is a shot I got of some rain clouds in between the showers. Unfortunately the background is a boring grey rather than white or blue sky (or even better more cloud formations)
This is a 3 shot panorama. I shot using the K200D and Jupiter-9 85mm lens with aperture set to f5.6. I made sure to shoot the frames quickly so the movement of the clouds wouldn’t interfere with the stitching.
Shooting and Processing as follows:
I received my Jupiter-9 lens in the mail about 1.5 weeks ago, and I finally had a chance to use it yesterday. The Jupiter-9 is a lens made in Russia, available in various mounts (mine is M42, easy to use on most DSLRs), its 85mm focal length, and wide aperture of f2.0 make it a fine lens for portrait photography.
It seems to be selling for around $120USD or so (plus shipping) on Ebay these days. I paid about $140AU total for mine, as I wanted a good condition example, and this particular example included the plastic hard case, both caps, and a lens in reportedly excellent condition. I was not disappointed when it arrived, the condition was like new. For anyone interested the seller was petersburg_deals. Shipment was quite quick considering it was from Russia.
Down to the lens itself. I find it to be very sharp, but I have only tested at f2.8 and f4.0 so far. Most reviews say the lens is a little soft at f2.0, but the kind of softness that works great in portrait photography. I find the colours to be great, let me know what you think. Here are the first lot of test shots. You can check out all the other photos I’ve taken with this lens in my Jupiter-9 Flickr Set
