I am still in the process of testing my new gear, taking the camera with me and taking a number of test shots. Sooner or later, I will be going on more dedicated photo-walks. Actually looking forward to plan my shots for a long while and maybe even taking my tri-pod with me.
I have been out on two occasions to give the 40mm / 2 a test and get used to that lens. For these two sessions I intentionally limited myself to an aperture of f/2, knowing it would be a lot of bokeh and a bit challenging. According to what I had read about the lens, it would have performed better at f/4 or even f/2.8, but I wanted to check it out. Of course there will be a later post where I check the lens across its register.
Checking out the boke and depth of field
Even though the day was cloudy but without an ‘interesting’ cloudiness, I liked the way this shot turned out. You see a very blurry change in the sky, so you know there is something happening. The tulips in front stand out clearly, with neutral colors and everything else fades in a soft bokeh. Of course I could be post-processing with a neutral highlighting, but that would potentially remove the structure in the sky or with a bit exaggeration. Just for funs sake I add two edited versions, but personally I would stick with the original one.
Testing the sharpness
Next I wanted to test the sharpness of the lens wide open and with a shallow depth of field.
Here you can see the shallow depth of field, even tough the seagulls were some meters from me. They look quite sharp in the total view and both the rock in the foreground and the tree in the background are softened. Let’s look at this cropped 1:1 rendering of the pixels (one pixel on the screen matches one pixel on the sensor).
You can clearly see the details of its eye, beak and the structure of its feathers. The feathers could be more pronounced, but shooting with f/2 that can be expected. So I am quite happy with how this lens renders the image on the sensor.
How about movement?
Given the shallow depth of field at f/2 any movement that is not exactly in parallell with the area of focus will be extremely tricky, As you see below, it looks OK, but if you focus on the seagull that has already lifted, you see a slight blur around its wings. It has already left the area of the focus, but as said before, that is only to be expected.
Overall I am more than happy with the performance of this lens on the Z6 and I am looking forward to try it out in other settings.
Restarting Photography 