Some days ago I promised, describing a photo-reportage published in the Italian section of my blog, that I will have revealed the equipment I used. The first article was about the Hoodman Pro-loupe, this time I'm talking about a great tele lens: the Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 300/4.
What I could really say about this lens? It is really a great performer: sharp, fast and with a great bokeh. And all this usually at a fraction of the price you'd pay for a more modern, but not always better, lens.
It's also good for landscape shooting, but beware of flares (use a hood), and use it with a good tripod: it can be attached directly on the lens, like in pretty every other long tele.
Let's talk about the drawbacks now. The first one you discover is that it's damn heavy: using it handheld needs good training (I had my shoulder aching after the reportage). The other hidden one is that, just like most of the Sonnar type lenses around, suffers from pretty heavy CA (Chromatic Abberation) so shooting against the light isn't very advisable (even if I did it... and it was not that bad all in all).
My final verdict is very positive though, I love use this lens for street portraiture and reportage, and sometimes it could be useful to capture small portions of panorama that you wouldn't be able to with shorter lenses.
(Alessandro Guerani is a professional photographer specialized in food shooting. He lives in Bologna, Italy, and is available for assignments to create the images you always craved. Read the "About me" or contact him using the "Mail me" in the blog menu above.)
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2 commenti :
Another problem with it is that the tripod mount is designed for the wider east-german screw. A bush can be used to reduce the hole to the right size for the standard Western tripod screw but some modern quick-release plates have screws that are a bit too long to hold the lens tightly. There are others that will tighten properly but it needs checking before you try to use the lens on a tripod.
Mine has a standard screw, probably older ones suffer from this problem but I finally found some solid, reliable, screw converters.
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