I’ve fallen madly, deeply in love with 28mm. And aside from work stuff, my Z 28mm f/2.8 SE hasn’t left my Z6ii since buying it in September. Because it takes such small filters (52mm), experimenting with new looks hasn’t cost me a ton. For daylight I stack a warming polarizer over my Black Satin 1, and at night the former comes off.

Shooting black and white in 28mm just feels right too. So I bought a red filter for that. It forces me to use my camera’s monochrome setting, this way I’m actively composing in black and white versus just converting in post. The contrast I’m getting is blowing me away.

The only real issue I have with my modern 28mm is that setting a focus zone for shooting from the hip (or, in my case, lower) for street is kind of impossible. While I’ve figured out the settings to increase my hit rate — whatup continuous high extended mode — I’m still relying on my camera’s very solid auto-focus to grab what I’m hoping for. It locks about 70 - 80 percent of the time.

[All images below captured with Nippon Kogaku 2.8cm f/3.5 NIKKOR-H Non AI unless otherwise noted]

“Why not just manual focus your lens?” Good question. The issue there is in its infinite wisdom, Nikon doesn’t have an explicit guide for doing so. On my Z6ii, instead of a readout with indicators for focus distance in feet there’s just a horizontal bar with an infinitum loop on one end and a flower on the other. Not helpful. I can’t trust it’s going to keep the same focus zone as I walk either.

So I bought a Nippon Kogaku 2.8cm f/3.5 NIKKOR-H Non AI for $92 shipped from KEH. It’s the same filter size as my modern lens so the value goes even further. I’m sure I’ll have more to say the more I take it out, but for now I love the images it produces. I haven’t spent any time doing color with it, but given this lens’ heritage documenting the Vietnam war its monochrome output is what will keep it in my bag.

Do I wish the aperture opened wider? Sure, but the F/2 model was out of my budget. As it stands, I’ve got under $500 invested between two lenses and the array of filters in my kit. Proof that you don’t need to spend a ton of money to inject new life into your photography.

We started out in Corktown walking down Michigan Ave, before a brief foray to the top of my office’s parking garage downtown after sunset. It’s there that I got some long exposures with his tabletop tripod. And, it’s where I got a chance to try out his new telephoto, the Nikkor Z 70 - 200mm F/2.8 S.

The reach on that thing is unreal. Especially when you switch to crop mode and gain an extra 100mm at the expense of half your megapixels. Going from such a wide FOV to that was damn near whiplash-inducing, and I only got a couple of frames that moved the needle for me [above].

I’m not the biggest fan of resolutions. Last year I started setting goals instead:

• Launch photo website: gestures broadly
  
  

• Reduce photo catalog by 30 percent: This is harder to track when I took over 12,000 photos in 2023. And then culled over 5,000 of them before getting through August during the holiday break
  
  

• Enter four photo contests: Done and done. National and global contests are tough. I entered Life Framer (and did a year’s membership), and Whalebone and didn’t make the cut. I fared better locally with Composing Detroit but didn’t make the cut for Dirty Show ‘24.
  
  

• Model session: Nope. 2024 though.
  
  

• Launch Plain Sight Insta: Not yet. I did add a new feature to Plain Sight though, Feed. It’s, as the name suggests, a feed of images I don’t have to crop or stick on white backgrounds to accommodate different aspect ratios.
  
  

• Weekly photo blog posts: Sigh. What I need to do here is set a deadline for myself to just post something here in general, whether it’s a big blog like this, or just a set of images to Feed. Not everything needs to be a gigantic post such as this.