TOMMY SHIH PHOTOGRAPHY

Usually I am not married to using one lens, be it for a job or a personal project. I have an idea of which lens or lenses will work based on the goal of the shoot, but will bring several just in case because, “the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry,” as the saying goes. It pays to be prepared. That being said, if there’s a lens that I love to use, it’s Nikon’s 35mm f/2.0. I just call it “the 35.” Get used to it. I used to think this lens was useless. That was back when I was shooting with a DSLR with a smaller APSC size sensor (D200, D300) vs a full frame sensor (D700). The field of view with the same lens on a smaller sensor is narrower by a factor of 1.5, so the 35mm had the effective field of view of a 52.5mm. This made it a normal focal length vs it’s intended wide-angle.  The difference is the perspective. Perspective changes with your distance from the subject, and on a full frame camera I like the intimacy of being close to the subject that the 35 requires, yet I also like that it includes quite a bit of the background/environment. That’s why I believe that the 35 is the perfect lens for lifestyle photography, taking into account my vision and the way I like to shoot.

This won’t be your typical gear-head lens review. While I do take into account sharpness, color saturation, resolution etc when I decide to purchase or rent lenses, and I’ll go look up a MTF chart every once in a while, all that information can be found at various sites around the internet. Plus they run countless tests and have greater resources available to them to provide accurate and useful results. I don’t have the time or patience for that, so I’m going to talk about why I like using this lens, and how it functions when I’m on a shoot. I’ll also give some insights on what to consider or watch out for when using this lens.

For example, here is a shot from the Michelle in Brooklyn shoot I did that is fairly intimate (maybe a little bit more intimate with the magazine and cereal), but shows a good deal of the environment behind her. For reference, the table was pretty square in shape and I was sitting in the seat across from her when I took this shot. So I was probably only about 3-4 feet away.

As with any wide angle lens, when using the 35 you have to be aware of distortion when you are close to your subject, especially if your subject is a person. Keeping the plane of your camera parallel to the plane of the subject is a way to reduce distortion. Below is an example with Michelle, even closer but from head to hips she is on the same plane as the camera. Since I am really close to her, if I had shot this from below her hips would have looked wider, and if I had shot down then she would have looked like a bobble head doll. A beautiful one of course, but nevertheless a bobble head.

One reason I love the 35 is that since it’s just slightly wider than a normal lens, it seems like what we see through our eyes…but a little bit different. One example is the dreamy feel of this set of images I did for an editorial last fall in NY. The slight distortion of the background gives it a surreal effect.

Another thing I like about this lens is that I touched on before, is that I am able to be a comfortable distance from the subject when I am shooting. I personally don’t like to be too far away since I don’t have the loudest voice, and also close proximity allows me to “get right in there.” By that I mean it’s almost like it’s just me and the subject–even if there is a make up artist, a stylist, my assistant and a client on the shoot standing off to the side. It also puts the viewer right into the experience of being there. Below are a few images I did where I feel a very personal mood is created. The model is Sonya, and she delivers in every way. And the curly haired cutie with her in the starfish shot is Hailey, daughter of Crystal Pancipanci (a great stylist and make up artist that I often work with).

This post is getting pretty long and I haven’t finished going over the myriad ways I love this lens. So, I’m breaking this off here and will update with Part 2.

Continue to Part 2