Tag Archives: 85mm

Rainy Day


Rainy Day
Originally uploaded by jezza323

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:

  1. Shot in Pentax RAW (PEF)
  2. Imported into Lightroom 2.5
  3. Exported to 3x 16 bit TIFF
  4. Stitched using Autopano Giga
  5. Rendered to a single 16 bit TIFF
  6. Imported new TIFF into Lightroom 2.5
  7. Applied adjustments in Lightroom (clarity, contrast, white balance)
  8. Exported to JPG for Web

Jupiter 9 Review – 85mm f2.0

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

Very first shot with the lens mounted on my K200D. A friends free promotional mug at work. This is at f2.0, but doesn’t give a good indication of sharpness.

This is an f2.8 test shot, unfortunately the light was very uneven, but you can see the lens is sharp.

This is a 100% crop from the previous image, showing how sharp the image is. No post processing sharpening has been applied (click the image to view at original size).