Zeiss Distagon 35mm f/1.4 ZA in Japan

One of the reasons I picked up the Zeiss Distagon 35mm f/1.4 ZA was so I'd have a high-quality wide-angle for a trip I was taking to Japan. I got some nice shots with it like the following ones, but my final verdict is that it's just too big and heavy for a 35mm lens. The thing that bothers me most about the size of it isn't the inconvenience, but how much attention it draws. Candid street photography is a lot tougher when everyone is noticing what looks like a giant zoom lens.

So I'll be (probably maybe) selling it at some point. I'm not particularly into native lenses for my camera anyway -- I don't like using autofocus, and I don't mind changing the aperture manually (which you have to do with this lens anyway). Plus the cost was like 10 times what I'm used to paying for vintage lenses.

But I can't say I wasn't very happy with some of the shots it caught, like these five...

 

This is the great Mistral Bleu Bar in Tokyo. The Zeiss was very nice here wide open at f/1.4, with a 1/80th shutter and 1250 ISO.

Zeiss confidently calls their 35mm Distagon the "master of light." It does handle various exposures wonderfully, such as this overexposure on the very scenic Miyajima Island, near Hiroshima. Shutter: 1/250th, f/2.0, ISO: 100.

This was peeking into a record store in Osaka. I loved the Lightin Hopkins poster on the wall. The lens gave me a pretty flexible depth of field considering it was wide-open at f/1.4. Shutter: 1/125th, ISO: 100.

Another from Osaka, also wide open. There's a lot going on here between the bright lights and the bits of night in the background, but the lens did fine with all of it. The bicyclist isn't as sharp as she could be, but that was only due to her movement, and my zone-focusing being a tad off. Shutter: 1/100th, f/1.4, ISO: 500.

This was on a train from Nara to Kyoto. Obviously this one is more a matter of content than anything special photographically -- I might've been just as happy with a phone photo of the moment. I always feel self-conscious taking shots like this. That raises the question: Is it creepier to overtly grab shots like this with a big lens like the Distagon, or to be stealthy about it with something smaller? Shutter: 1/250th, f/6.3, ISO: 500.

Three Silhouettes

Turner Classic Movies has, to my joy, been running film noir classics all summer. In keeping with their summer of darkness, here are 3 black and white silhouette shots.

The first was selected for Explore on Flickr. That mostly just means bragging rights, but the image got over 6,000 views so that's neat I guess. I was walking up Wisconsin Avenue in Washington DC, and I noticed a guy walking into the light of the alley I was passing. I was shooting the Zeiss Distagon 35mm wide open at f/1.4.

Zeiss Distagon ZA 35mm f/1.4. Shutter: 1/60th, f/1.4, ISO: 400.

The next is with the Helios 44-2. Not the type of shot that lens is best for, but I was happy that the bird waited there long enough for me to move until I was catching it against one of the brighter bits of cloud.

Helios 44-2. Shutter: 1/1000, f/11, ISO: 100. Extra tweaking in editing to turn the gloomy up!

Next is Hemlines playing against the sunset at Fort Reno here in DC. This one goes back to the Asahi Takumar 135mm f/3.5. I talked about that lens in my last post, but I have to say again what a bargain it is to get this kind of performance from a lens that can bet found well under $200. The sharpness is so crisp that it picked up individual hairs here very clearly from 15+ feet away.

Asahi Takumar 135mm f/3.5. Shutter: 1/2500, f/7.1 (or something close to that), ISO: 250.

Warming Up to the Zeiss Distagon 35mm f/1.4

I'm starting to get a feel for this lens. It can be tough shooting well with a 35mm vs. a 50+mm, as Henri Cartier-Bresson explained beautifully...

"The 35 is splendid when needed, but extremely difficult to use if you want precision in composition. There are too many elements, and something is always in the wrong place. It is a beautiful lens at times when needed by what you see. But very often it is used by people who want to shout. Because you have a distortion, you have somebody in the foreground and it gives an effect. But I don’t like effects. There is something aggressive, and I don’t like that. Because when you shout, it is usually because you are short of arguments."

Here's a shot where I had good luck. The colors were quite nicely handled by the lens -- the reason the sky is so pink is that 4th of July fireworks were going off over the National Mall, a couple miles from my location of Dupont Circle in DC.

The Distagon was at f/3.2 here.

Paperhaus at the Embassy of France

Washington, DC's own Paperhaus playing to a hometown crowd at the French Embassy. This was shot on the new Sony Zeiss Distagon T* FE 35mm f/1.4 ZA lens, which I'm trying out. It's gotten rave reviews, but I haven't been blown away by it yet. I may just need to give it time and find my way with it, so I'll reserve judgment for now. Shutter: 1/100, f/1.4, ISO: 500.

Back to the Helios 85mm for this one. Shutter: 1/100, f/2.8 or so, ISO: 1600.