May 2018
As seen through a 28mm lens
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, but whenever I feel like challenging myself in my photography I pick a fixed focal length lens and try to shoot things that I usually won’t use it for.
I have a 25mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm in my arsenal and over time I will update this blog with the results of my challenges.
First up: the Canon EF 28mm f 1.8 via a Metabones adapter on my Sony a7 Mark III.
I decided to call some friends and summon them at the Prater, an amusement park as well as a green area with a forest in Vienna. I didn’t really have a plan but got inspired by the outfits of my friends, the play of light and shadow and what the lens would do with its very shallow depth of field.
As seen through a 28mm lens
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, but whenever I feel like challenging myself in my photography I pick a fixed focal length lens and try to shoot things that I usually won’t use it for.
I have a 25mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm in my arsenal and over time I will update this blog with the results of my challenges.
First up: the Canon EF 28mm f 1.8 via a Metabones adapter on my Sony a7 Mark III.
I decided to call some friends and summon them at the Prater, an amusement park as well as a green area with a forest in Vienna. I didn’t really have a plan but got inspired by the outfits of my friends, the play of light and shadow and what the lens would do with its very shallow depth of field.
In general using a 28mm lens for portraits and people can be a tricky situation because of its distortion towards the sides of the frame. But the fact that you can show a lot of the surroundings in combination with the creamy bokeh the lens creates allowed me to clearly isolate the person but still give a good feeling of the environment.
A more common use for me for a lens this wide would be landscape pictures. What I rarely do though is to still use a very shallow depth of field to again separate clearly fore and backgrounds in the landscape. Looking for an unusual angle helps making this effect even more obvious.
I’m sure there are more ways to use this lens in creative ways and I can’t wait to take it for another spin. In the end, this was a spontaneous and fun photoshoot, and thanks to my friend Romualdo I got myself in a picture as well (showing a pose that I’d wished one of my friends would do).
Have you seen the other monthly updates? Check out the archive!