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B. Moose Peterson: Shooting with a NIKKOR 24mm Wide Angle Lens

© Moose Peterson Loading...

© Moose Peterson

D3S, AF-S NIKKOR 24mm f/1.4G ED, 1/6000 second, f/1.4, ISO 200, aperture priority, Matrix metering.

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Maybe we tended to automatically associate Moose Peterson with telephoto lenses because of a story he wrote for us about the challenges of photographing birds. In that story he mentioned his favorite lens for grabbing images of visitors to his backyard feeders is the 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED. And he said that his field lens is the 600mm f/4G ED VR, which he sometimes matches with the AF-S Teleconverter TC-17E II for an even longer reach. Well, the truth is that Moose is an incredibly versatile photographer of diverse subject matter who uses NIKKORs of various focal lengths, including the new AF-S NIKKOR 24mm f/1.4G ED wide-angle that he put through its paces recently in the field and at workshop sessions.

In low light, indoors and outdoors, to call attention to his subject, Moose found that...well, we'll let him tell you about it.

"The 24mm f/1.4G ED is a wicked-sharp lens that has one purpose in my book, and that's wide-angle coverage while isolating the subject. It's all about storytelling as I set the stage with the 24mm and let that very shallow f/1.4 depth of field put the subject in the limelight. With its amazing corner-to-corner flat-field sharpness when shot wide open, the lens is just asking to be let loose to fill its niche in the NIKKOR lineup.

"One way I make the most of the lens is by getting close to the subject—I mean within a foot or two. Then, being very careful to make sure the film plane is parallel with the elements in the frame that must be tack sharp, I let the deliberately out-of-focus elements of the photo grab viewers' imaginations, making them ask, 'What's back there?' When you tap into imagination, you've won the visual communication game.

"The fast f/1.4 nature of the 24mm naturally lends itself to low-light photography. How low? Well, how about the pitch black of night? One sure way to see the quality of a lens is to include a point light source, and when you include a couple million in the form of stars, you can instantly see how stellar the results are. Shooting it wide open on the D3S at ISO 1600, the results you see [in the third photograph] are obtainable by any backyard start gazer.

"But let's get down to where this lens really excels, and that's photographing folks in magical light. The depths of a cell block of an abandoned prison is no place to go unarmed—for great, dramatic light, that is. A little crack of light here, a shaft of light there—just let your imagination loose. I positioned my subject just so and let the 24mm f/1.4 go to work. You can count every hair in that beard and every eyelash—just look at the magic this lens can perform with barely a beam of light.

"Speed, performance, sharpness—for me, there's nothing like that 24mm NIKKOR."

You can view the variety of Moose's images at his website, www.moosepeterson.com.

To learn about the HDR (High Dynamic Range) technique he used to produce the first two photographs, click here.