Photographer Anna Riedel photographed with the incomparable legendary unmatched superlative Nikkor 300mm f/2 ED-IF, shot between f/2 and f/2.8 at 1/200 of a second, and get this folks, Handheld! This lens is truly amazing, like Shazam!, stupid crazy wild!! It is 15 lbs of huge perfect glass, and with the Nikon D3s makes close to 20lbs of shooting pleasure, good thing I lift weights as part of my photographer training. As you can see it is really sharp on her pretty little eyelashes, and the focus moves beautifully out across her face, at this close distance perhaps 15-18ft away the depth of focus is only a few millimeters!! I also like how in the fading light the right side of her face still has a touch of warmth from the receding sunset, and the left side is picking up the cooler tones of the encroaching night.
Anna was part of a group of wedding photography enthusiasts shooting a few models out at Sunset Ranch up in Pupukea on the North Shore. I was corralled into the fun by Josh at Hawaii Photo Rentals, he designated me his lens wrangler as he brought a ton (maybe 200 lbs) of fine photo gear out for everyone to play with. I got to set up the Canon 800mm f/5.6 that I talked about as the Perfect Paparazzi lens a few blog post back and was able to entice a few shooters to try it out. I didn’t get to shoot very much, although everyone else did and they looked like they were having a very fun time shooting in the wonderful light. We did a group shot and I held the massive Nikkor 300mm f/2 as my prop in the photo, and after we wrapped that shot and was milling about Anna got into my zone of interest. I’m sure she knew I was shooting, the massive 6 1/3 inch diameter front element makes the “unobtrusive photographer” a joke, but she was kind enough to tolerate 3 frames in the fast fading light.
