Multiple slices of happiness and satisfaction this morning. Already a great day! (Short lens eval. after some "gray space" about swimming...).

 

discipline and motivation. to feel fast and strong is empowering.

I'll get to the photographic subject matter in a second but first I just have to luxuriate in the memory of this morning's swim practice. We've had good luck, in spite of the heat, in getting the water temperatures a bit lower in the Western Hills Athletic Club pool over the last several weeks. From a high water temperature of 85° in the worst of the hot and humid days we've seen a pretty rapid decline into the upper 70s lately. 

I thought we'd hit the best we could hope for when I was in the pool on Tuesday morning. It was 79° which is close to perfect--- but today.... Today the chatter on the deck was all about the new, low pool temperature for this Summer. A perfect, competition-ready, 76-77° degrees. Just absolutely perfect. And we could feel the difference in our workout. It was like free money. Or the fountain of youth.

It's Thursday so coach Jenn delivered her usual I.M. (Individual Medley) practice with lots of sets of butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke. Not long yardage but yards with a bit more intensity. It was good. We all swam well. And the water continued to be amazing. Exhilarating.

I can't wait for tomorrow's swim adventure. And Saturday's. And Sunday's. It's almost as fun as buying new cameras...

But you probably didn't come here to read about swimming. I'm thinking we're still mostly focusing on photography. At least I am....

After swim practice today I headed back to the office with a sense of mission. I was scheduled to photograph a new hire for the radiology practice I've worked with for over 25 years. I have hundreds of folders and galleries of the practice staff on Smugmug.com, some going back to the film days, and I was looking forward to adding a new doctor to the collection this morning. 

I was anticipating this session in my studio because I was going to use a new lens for the first time for work. It's the Mitakon 135mm f2.5 lens that's made in a Fuji GFX mount. It's a long, heavy lens with not even the slightest nod toward automation. There are no electrical contacts between this lens and the camera. And, obviously, no auto focus. Just the good, old focus by hand that we all used to do so well....

I bought this lens specifically to do portraits in the studio. It's the equivalent of a 106mm lens on a full frame camera. And even though I had no real expectation that it would be sharp across the frame at f2.5 I knew I'd be using it most of the time at f5.6, or in that neighborhood. After all, most clients really do want both the eyes and the tip of the nose in focus on their portraits...

The Fuji GFX50Sii is very tolerant of older, non-system lenses. I used the combination mounted on a tripod and I took advantage of the image magnification feature of the camera to make sure I was sharply focusing on my subject's eyes. I also had focus peaking engaged so I could tell if we were moving around too much front to back and back to front. The exposure, with my LED lights in various modifiers, was aperture of 7.1, shutter speed of 1/60th of a second, and ISO 320. I shot Raw+Fine Jpegs mostly so the previews would be ample and detailed. All the better to fine focus with. 

My take on the lens is that it's nicely sharp in the center two thirds of the frame from f4.0 up the scale to at least f16. The only place where the lens falls short for me is that at a portrait focus distance (about 6 feet) and at f5.6+ there is corner vignetting that is small but visible. I left a bit of extra "air" around my subject just in case and used that extra compositional slop as crop space to cut out the vignette. The trash space was about 1/20th of the frame. Not a big deal if you know about it in advance. 

I know that the Fuji 110 f2.0 lens is supposed to be the flagship lens of the whole system and a heart throb portrait lens but for my use in studio this 135mm does a fine job. And that's how I'll end up using it. As a studio portrait lens. Is there a Fuji 110 in my future? Who knows?

I did have a back light on the set but saw no flaring. Again ---- it's a heavy lens and having an L bracket is a blessing for tripod mounting. 

The young doctor I photographed arrived right on time and I ushered him into a temporarily chilly studio. I'll turn the AC back up to 78° now that he's gone. But I had to give the guy a break since he had to wear a suit and tie... He was amiable and very happy to have nailed a great position with a really good practice here in the city where he grew up. And, in fact, the practice I do these images for has been named as one of the top ten employers in the city every year, for over a decade. So.....lucky him. 

When I do these portraits I try to sit down as soon as the subject exits and import them into the system. Mistakes seem to happen more often as time goes by... I import all, edit out the frames that don't make the grade and then do a quick, global tweak before exporting big Jpegs for the online gallery. I make the Jpegs "beefy" so I would be able to use them in a pinch if anything happened to the other two sets of back up images. 

Within an hour of our session the gallery has been sent to marketing and I get to move on with the rest of my day. 

So, my takeaway vis-a-vis the 135mm Mitakon is that you would never want to use a manual focus lens with a long focus throw like this for sports or action but for controlled work in the studio the lens is a good option. Super sharp eyelashes, if that's where you focused. And nice overall tonality. I'll probably spark up the final files with a bit of the ole clarity slider in post production but really, the images are sharp enough already. I sometimes just like a little extra sparkle. 

Happy subject. Happy client. Happy photographer. Happy, happy swimmer. Today, right now, this is how life is supposed to be!!!