My Wedding Photography Lenses Part 2: the 35mm

Sitting at the DMV and Writing About My Nikon 35mm f1.4 lens

After the Bend Bulletin laid me off in the fall of 2012 I had a choice to make. Should I stay doing pictures or go do something else? The answer, super easy, was to stay doing pictures. Something I’m doing to this day. Actually I’ll head out to the river after my 2 hour wait and go for a walk with my Fuji.

Recently I started advertising again on the Wedding Wire and had to go through about 5,000 pictures to originally, before I found out you could use 50 pictures, get it down to 20. That’s pretty tough. Luckily I’ve done it so many times most of the choices had already been chosen. I did want to go through a pile of weddings again just to be sure nothing slipped through some of the older weddings and add a few from more recent weddings. Just after we started getting out of COVID I decided to go mirrorless. This was a result of using for a couple years the amazing Fuji X100V camera. I loved that little thing. My one and only problem with it being the fixed lens wasn’t super sharp when wide open at f2. It’s sharp enough for most people, but I need absolute perfection in my machines. When I switched I went with Canon because of the amazing 28-70mm f2 lens that will get its own blog post later on. I went with zooms thinking nobody cared about what picture truly looks like because they ultimately just want pictures that work well enough for them.

I’m slowly coming to realize this was a mistake because I shoot best with prime lenses. My brain works better and I see pictures in a more artistic way. However when I made the switch nobody had any super fast primes and I was stuck with the zooms. Now? I’m at a crossroads because I don’t really want to spend a pile of money on yet more camera gear that I alone would care about.

When looking through the pictures I always love going through the metadata and seeing what equipment and lenses get used the most. In Lightroom you can give 1-5 stars for each picture while editing. My five stars had 20 and the 4 stars had the required 50 photos exactly. So when it came time to load the pictures into the Wedding Wire I was all set.

But what lenses were used the most? What pictures were the best of the best? I’ve used a ton of lenses and cameras over the years but one lens rose to the top of the pile. To get an accurate count of the lenses used I went down to 2 stars and looked at the numbers. The Nikon 35mm f1.4G lens is by far my most used lens perhaps ever. I did most of my personal favorite pictures with this lens and its numbers dwarfed the other lenses. At the end of my time with DLSR’s I started using the amazing Nikon 28mm f1.4 lens. It’s sharper, brighter, and has better contrast than the 35mm. But I didn’t get as many pictures with it. Perhaps this was a function of not using it as much. But I got more pictures with the Nikon 105mm f1.4 and it was used about as much as the 28mm.

We all have a lens we gravitate to for most of our work. It’s the one lens we need. For some people it’s a 28mm, for others the 50mm, but for me and I’m sure a bunch of other people it’s the 35mm lens. It’s how we see the world. Being a fixed lens I love having to move to make the picture rather than just stand in one place zooming all day. That’s boring. With a prime you have to become part of what’s happening. Outdoor photographer Galen Rowel called it “participatory photography.” My brain thinks better when I’m participating in a wedding with my camera rather than just standing on the sidelines.

Recently Canon came out with a fast RF 35mm lens but every real review I saw called it junk for photography. It’s built for video. Who knows or cares about “focus breathing?” All I care about is Fast, Sharp, Contrast, Bokeh. Seeing how crap that lens is for photography I sold the X10V and bought a Fuji XT-5 with the 23mm f1.4 lens (a 35mm equivalent). Now I have that and the equivalent of 20mm, 50mm, 135mm and a trigger for my Profoto flashes.

So here’s my collection of 2 star photos culled from 5,000 photos all shot with the Nikon 35mm f1.4 lens.