The sky was clear and crisp last night and the waxing gibbous moon was sharply outlined.  I wanted a really tight shot of the moon to combine with other backgrounds. This requires a focal length close to 2000mm.  I tried a variety of combinations of lenses and telextenders, but the final image below was made with a very inexpensive 1300mm lens by Samyang.  The optical quality of this lens is what you would expect from such an inexpensive product.  Nonetheless, it was good enough to achieve a tight shot that I was able to clean up and enhance later in post-processing.

This super-telephoto image of the moon was super-imposed over a wide angle shot I had of the Milky Way.  The moon photo was taken with a Nikon D800 set to 1.2x crop mode, which effectively increased the 1300mm focal length to 1560mm.  Exposure was 1/160sec. at an ISO of 400.

Thanksgiving day!

Here are the photos of the meal we prepared at our New York home.  I always drive my wife a little crazy by wanting to photograph everything before it is served.

I prepared a small set beforehand by a window so all I had to do was put the turkey and side dishes into the scene and take a quick picture before the family sat down to dinner elsewhere.  Taken with a Nikon D800 and 24-70mm zoom lens.

Taken with available tungsten light in the kitchen at an ISO of 1000.

My daughter, Jamie, always makes a pumpkin pie for the occasion.  Photographed with a 50mm f/1.4 lens on a Nikon D800.

Using the Nikkor 50mm f/1/4 G lens for close-up photography
Variations on a theme -- using extension tubes for macro photography

Normally I take my close-up shots using a macro lens, such as the 60mm or 105mm Nikon Macro lens, or the Sigma 50mm macro.  When I want a different look, something less sharp with a softer feel to it, I will switch to a normal lens and use it with a close-up device.  The photos below were taken with the Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 G lens attached to a Kenko 12mm extension tube.  The images were shot wide open at f/1.4 resulting in an extremely shallow depth-of-field at such a close range. This combination also gives a soft glow around the out-of-focus areas.  This is something that would probably not happen if a dedicated macro lens had been used.

The Kenko extension tubes can come as a set of three, 12mm, 25mm, and 36mm.  The advantage they have over other brands, including Nikon's own set, is that the Kenko tubes retain auto-focus and lens control through the camera.  The tubes can be used separately or stacked for even greater extension.  There are no lens elements in the tubes themselves to degrade the optical quality of the lens.

For the photos below I used only the 12mm tube mounted between the lens and the camera as shown above.  Extension tubes do decrease the amount of light passing to the camera sensor and thereby reduce exposure a bit, but the Kenko set transmits this information to the camera so determining the correct exposure is not a problem.

 

The f/1.4 aperture and pin-point focus on one row of keys throws the background into a very soft out-of-focus look.

True macro lenses generally retain excellent sharpness over the entire frame with practically no rectilinear distortion.  Here you can see that the more normal lens adds a roundness to the lines of the keyboard keys.

All these shots were done with a black keyboard I had purchased to use as a prop for stock photography.  The camera was a Nikon D600 and the keyboard was back lit by soft window light.  The color tints were enhanced later when bringing the RAW files into Photoshop.

Shooting with a back lit sun is one of my favorite lighting techniques.  It works particularly well on autumn scenes to bring out the vibrant colors in leaves.  All photos were taken with a Nikon D600 -- the two wide scenes with a 24-120mm zoom and the close-up of yellow maple leaves with the Sigma 50mm macro lens wide open for a shallow depth of field.

The very hard afternoon light was softened considerably in post-processing to give a much lighter hazy look to the image.  Taken with the Nikon D600 and 24-120mm zoom.

To achieve the color difference between the blue exterior of the window and the warm yellow interior I mixed daylight light with tungsten.  Regular daylight from my studio windows lit the exterior window and snow in this scene.  I used tungsten lights mixed with candle light on the background.  Later I post-processed the RAW image twice, once with a blue cast to enhance the exterior window color, and once with an enhanced yellow cast to emphasize the interior.  I stacked the two images as layers in Photoshop with the warm light on bottom and cool light on top.  Next I masked out the windows to allow the warm light to come in.

These photos were taken at sunset in the woods near where I am staying.  I used the Nikon D600 and 24-120mm lens wide open to achieve the out-of-focus background with soft bokeh effect. I think the bokeh is quite good considering the maximum aperture on this lens is fairly stopped down at f/4.

I particularly liked the way the suns rays flared out behind this leaf.