The Grand Experiment!

Well boys and girls, another Marriott, and another O:Dark thirty flight!  Would love to be home with my beautiful bride, but sadly Nikon has a nasty habit of expecting me to leave home to get paid, so off we go into the wild blue yonder at 6:10 a.m.  Actually,in all honesty, if I had to go off on assignment, this is a good one, Bar Harbor, Acadia National Park, and the great folks of the Bio Communications Association.  This is one of my favorite  groups and we always have a great time, at the Nikon provided workshops, across America.

To make this adventure even more fun, I’ve decided to go “old school” this trip and try out some the old classic manual focus Nikkors on the brand new, and incredible, D800!  Wait a minute you say, I thought the D800 was best used with only the newest and best Nikon glass??!!  That is the recommendation, but a lot of the video guys are using the older manual focus glass, because of how smoothly they can focus them, and they are getting great results, so I figured it was my turn to find out for myself, and you, if this is a good idea or not!  I also happen to own a good number of some of the best Nikkor manual focus lenses, and I would love to put them to work with the D800 when I take a notion to do so!   This little test will give us an idea as to just how good this old glass is!  I’m sure the D800 will put them to the test!

For the test I decided to use several of the maual lenses that I think are among the best film lenses Nikon ever made; the 24mm f 2.8 wide angle, the 55 Micro Nikkor f 2.8 lens, the 105mm Micro Nikkor f 2.8 and one of the true legendary lenses from the past, the 80-200 Nikkor f 4.5 zoom.  In the film days I used these lenses, almost every day.  As digital imaging came along, and zoom lenses got much better, we all started shooting a lot more with zooms.  I’m anxious to see if manually focusing these old sweethearts can yield some spectacular results, or that it will be a major league hassle to have to turn that little ring on the front of the lens, again!!!

The next few days will tell us the answers, and I promise to faithfully report them to you!  I certainly will be in a beautiful place to inact my plan!  Stay tuned, results will be on the way soon!

the pilgrim