Making Art with and old Nikon 50mm f1.8 E series lens

In a previous shoot that I had done, I noticed a difference in the contrast of the some of the images that were popping up on my screen when I was loading the photos into Adobe Lightroom. These images had more pop, the contrast was different, at first I thought that I had maybe changed some of the settings but I then remembered that I had pulled out my Nikon 50mm f1.2 AIS lens out of my camera bag to play around with and to see if I could still manually focus with it because of a nifty little feature inside my Nikon D700 that gives you manual focus confirmation and was quite surprised on how well it worked. This inspired me to try a different type of shoot were I would not rely on auto focus and just concentrate on the art of capturing the image with an old lens.

So for this art project I decided that I just wanted to use an old Nikon 50mm f1.8 E series pancake manual focus lens that I had found used for $25. I wanted to see what kind of B&W images I could get from the lens due to its low element count design and I wanted to how good my manual focus skills were, because it had been a while since I had used a manual focus lens exclusively. When I started my photography journey there was only manual focus lenses, auto focus was just beginning to come into the market.

For camera gear, I used a Nikon D700 with a Nikon 50mm f1.8 E series pancake lens with a Nikon O56 orange filter on it. I had experimented with this setup a few days before on another shoot that I did for fun, where I decided to photograph it as if I was using B&W film by using either a red, orange, yellow or green filter on the front of the lens to get a different contrast look on your images. I really liked the look I got with the orange filter so I decided to stick with it for this project. For studio lighting I used a Photogenic strobe with a strip dome soft box on it to get a nice narrow lighting effect on the model and a plain black backdrop.

I loved the results I got from this setup, the nice rich tones and the micro contrast that I got from the Nikon 50mm f1.8 E series lens were wonderful on the images that I made and I didn’t spend hardly anytime in Adobe Lightroom to achieve the look I wanted. I also surprised myself on how ell I was able manual focus in subdued lighting with Nikon D700. In an era now were you see these over priced high element count lenses on the market, in my opinion, what are you really getting? Lots of glass and plastic! How long will they last? This Nikon 50mm f1.8 E series lens for a 1970s budget lens that Nikon produced is really quite built well and it’s been around for more than 40 years! This has inspired me to shoot more with these vintages well made lenses on future projects.