With today's high ISO performance of digitals do we still need super fast lenses?

[eric_arnold]

<p>alex, every time you post your 58/1.4 shots i feel a twinge at my heart. or is that a tug at my wallet? nevertheless i am impressed with how you have been able to turn a d200 into a good low-light camera with that lens (and the Mir, which also seems nice). that kind of speaks volumes to the OP's question.</p>

<p>i'm a little reluctant to delve into MF waters, simply because i do far too much PJ stuff where AF is essential, but you have made an excellent case for fast MF primes. that last shot is particularly good because the ISO was only 640 and the image has decent sharpness for being at 1/60 and 1.6. with live bands/musicians, you can sometimes get away with a bit of motion blur, which adds to the scene rather than detracts from it.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>If I want the image to be cleaner without sacrificing as much sharpness I have to resort to faster glass i.e. 200/2 or 135/2 to be able to use a lower ISO.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>to address Ilkka's point, there is a(nother) solution: the D3s, which has very clean shadow areas up until 6400. but even with a D3s, you still may need faster glass than 2.8, especially if you are dealing with strong backlighting, i.e. neon (which overexposes at high ISO values like a supernova), or taking no-flash shots in environments which should be too dim for picture-taking.</p><div></div>

[eric_arnold]

<p>and the crop...</p><div></div>

[kmahler]

<p>Well that was a hell of a lot easier than I expected. It took me about 15 mins to disassemble the lens, clean the blades and put it back together. I think I am going to disassemble it again and clean the elements one more time, I left some spots on the back element. Here are some shots with the newly repaired Nikkor 50mm f1.4.</p>

<p>f1.4<br>

<img src="http://pics.kmahler.com/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=6949&g2_serialNumber=1" alt="" width="640" height="426" /></p>

<p>f2.0<br>

<img src="http://pics.kmahler.com/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=6952&g2_serialNumber=1" alt="" width="640" height="426" /><br>

f2.8<br>

<img src="http://pics.kmahler.com/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=6954&g2_serialNumber=1" alt="" width="640" height="426" /><br>

f16<br>

<img src="http://pics.kmahler.com/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=6966&g2_serialNumber=1" alt="" width="640" height="426" /></p>

<p>If you want to see more stops, they can be viewed on my website at http://pics.kmahler.com/main.php?g2_itemId=6947</p>

<p>If anyone else has the 50mm f1.4 with oily blades, it is really easy to repair yourself. </p>

<p>Kevin</p>

[Andrew Garrard]

<p>Kevin: Cool, glad it worked out for you!</p>

[alex_zepeda]

<p>Eric, a computer screen is very forgiving. They're small, and are low resolution devices. I just ordered some 4x6 prints to get a feel for what sort of sharpening and color correction I'd need to do. Sure, I need to sharpen the images *more*, but the slightly off focusing is very apparent. That said, photojournalists have been around for much longer than autofocus. Stopped down a bit on a full-frame camera and I don't see anything inherently impossible with trying to focus manually on moving subjects. After all, this is digital. Missed shots are cheap. With a better viewfinder and some practice and I think the rate of keepers would improve dramatically.</p>

<p>For low light situations tho, you cannot beat some sort of AF assist lamp. The red grid style is great and unobtrusive. There's simply no way I could even come close with the teeny tiny D200 VF and a manual focus lens. Any keepers I get in super low light situations are merely wild-assed guesses.</p>

<p><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2468/3644757119_eb40cc76cc_z.jpg?zz=1" alt="" width="640" height="428" /><br>

I liked the composition here, but probably should have opened it up a bit to blur the building a bit more. Because this wasn't posed, I left it at ƒ/4.5.</p>

<p><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3513/3822660764_fd354fffc9_z.jpg?zz=1" alt="" width="640" height="428" /><br>

This was shot at ƒ/3.5. As I recall, I was pretty surprised how many well focused shots I got of these guys. I doubt the Sigma 30 would have done as well. Something like this would have been hard to shoot with a kit zoom lens because the light was fading pretty fast. A decent constant 2.8 zoom lens would probably have been a-okay.</p>

<p>I've mixed feelings on the D200. On the one hand, I really don't like how noisy it is. But, from about ISO 200 – 640 it's got a very analog feeling noise to it. Almost like film? Maybe. I've learned to embrace it a bit. Beyond that, perhaps by ISO 1000 the color noise and shift is just awful. Sure you can counter that with some decent NR, but the resulting images leave me pretty disappointed.</p>

[alvinyap]

<p>DOF control; improved AF performance. Yes, I would love a 24mm/1.4DX VR.</p>

<p>Alvin</p>