As promised my Nikon (Nikkor) 105MM f/2.8 G ED AF-S Micro arrived in the mail! It took a few days before I had time to play with this but I was out front taking a few images this morning.
Upon receiving the lens I did work with it a little in the house and found a few things that created a few questions.
1. Most of my Nikkor Lens’ are from Japan, that said since I ordered this from Ebay I was concerned it may be not of the same quality. Upon review and searching online I found that nikkor lenses are made in Japan, Taiwan, and China. Each factory follows the same training, quality control, and standards as each other factory.
2. While focusing the lens appeared to randomly “click”, this odd noise really concerned me as none of my other lenses do that. I did some searching on this as well and on the nikonian.org site I found that this is also normal and that it’s at standard f-stops across all of the 105MM. This is not an issue as the lens still performs well!
When on auto focus the lens does hunt a little while trying to determine how to focus and this takes longer than on other lenses. The hunting will take a bit to get use to but I really prefer manual focus thus far on this lens anyway. This mixed with the breathing may cause issues for some people, but for me it servers the need and quite well I may add.
Below are a few of the images I took this morning, the only editing that was done to these was cropping in Adobe LightRoom but with extra work they may be made more dramatic and impressive. I will continue to post about this lens with updates of things I learned as well as more images as I learn to better use this lens. These images in raw form will give you an idea of what you can get out of this lens with little to no experience with Macro work.
Dimensions: 4928 X 3264 Cropped: 3638 X 2939 Exposure: 1/250 sec at f/3.3 ISO: 100
I have included the dimensions, cropped, exposure, and ISO of each of these images to provide an idea of the settings and any changes. The impressiveness of images of the stamens is the little hairs that you can see in some of these images.
Dimensions: 4928 X 3264 Cropped: 956 X 973 Exposure: 1/500 sec at f/33 ISO: 100
The image above is cropped in very closely as I was impressed with the shapes of everything on the stamen. The detail that you can see with each piece of pollen. For those of you with macro experience I am sure this is all normal, but for people like me this is still all new and exciting!
Dimensions: 4928 X 3264 Cropped: 3512 X 2875 Exposure: 1/250 sec at f/3.3 ISO: 100
This image shows the detail and color in those tiny ants that are on the flowers. I was shocked when I was looking through the view finder and was able to see the color in the ant even. Those ants are tiny and I know I would be able to see details on small items but this was amazing!