Johan Ronsse photography

Everyone is always raving about 24-70 lenses. To this end, I decided to rent a Nikon 24-70mm lens for a day (at Grobet, €30)

On my crop camera this lens effectively becomes a 36-105mm lens. (The Nikon crop factor is 1.5x)

Buying it immediately would cost around €1400, this is not an option at this point in my “photo career”.

I went to my favorite photo location (the Antwerp zoo) and shot for a couple of hours. Afterwards I visited Aquatopia (this is an aquarium but they also have reptiles) for some more shooting.

I should definitely try and get some more work with people done, but I think the zoo is excellent for a lot of reasons:

1. There’s a ton of “models” there
2. I forces you to become fast with your camera’s controls: you go from indoor to outdoor a ton, the light situation changes all the time.
3. Some light is natural, some is fluorescent, some is incandescent, so it’s good practice in switching your white balance (although this is often easy to fix in post, it’s better get it right in camera)
4. Animals move so you are forced to learn to hold the camera still and/or find a place to rest it on (I don’t carry a tripod because I move around all the time)
5. Animals don’t complain

Back to the lens: I love it.

I’m very impressed by this lens: it’s light for what it does, it’s silent, it’s focus is extremely fast.
In fact, I think it makes both my 35mm 1.8 and 50mm 1.8 obsolete.

The only reason to use the 35mm and/or 50mm 1.8 would be for portraits, or when you need more light. But for street/travel/event/general photography? This lens might be all you need.

Photo’s taken at 1.8 aperture are often too shallow. For example, if you photograph a person you probably want the nose and eyes to be very sharp. Depending on your position and the focussing one of the two might be blurry. You don’t see it on your camera’s LCD but you’ll definitely notice it when you see the pictures on a computer screen.

For most of my pictures I would want something between F2.8 and F5.6 to separate background from foreground. I read somewhere that lenses are sharpest at double their lowest aperture so this should be ideal.

I returned the lens after shooting, but I kinda wanted to keep it.

After testing I’m wondering about:

1. The difference between a full frame sensor and a crop frame sensor in low-light situations. Having enough light to shoot at 1/100 of a second often makes the difference between a non-blurred or blurred photo.
2. The Nikon D800: if I have 36 megapixels to work with, I can probably make better crops
3. Range on a full-frame: the 24-70 might not provide enough range for the zoo, but I don’t see a 35-105mm lens in Nikon’s lens range. There is the 18-105mm VR but it has too many disadvantages (plastic mount, not F2.8) for me.

I’m also wondering about the Fujifilm X-Pro and X-100 camera’s, but that’s another story.