My Wedding Photography Lenses Part 3: the 105mm
A great lens for portraits and wedding photography
Though most of my wedding photography work through the teens was shot with the Nikon 35mm and 85mm f1.4 lenses, I always felt the 35mm was a little too narrow for what I like to do and the 85mm was a little too wide for the telephoto end. This isn’t to say they were horrible lenses and what was I ever thinking using them. It’s just they were always right there but left me wondering what a slightly wider and longer look would produce.
Nikon announced the 28mm f1.4 and the 105mm f1.4 lenses around the same time. I bought both when they were announced because those sounded like great lenses. I had already tried the Zeiss 135mm f2 manual focus lens and had made a surprising number of nice pictures in the four weddings it was used for, but the manual focus at f2 was killing me.
I always loved my Nikon 400mm f2.8 lens (nicknamed John Holmes) because of both its lightning fast autofocus and for the amazing blurry backgrounds it made in virtually every picture. The Nikon 105m f1.4 shot close enough at f1.4 would recreate the blurriness of the John Holmes. I loved that about this lens. It’s really magic in how it can do this trick. When blended with my Profoto or a reflector it made perfect portraits. Nice and tight without any annoying extraneous objects intruding into the frame. The added bonus of course being the subject popping out of the front of the picture with the perfectly blurry background.
The one massive weakness to this lens, and all the Nikon f1.4 prime lenses, is the autofocus speed. It could barely keep up with someone walking towards the camera. I missed a bunch of first dance pictures with this lens. Actually that slow autofocus is the biggest reason why I switched over to Canon when going mirrorless. Apparently Nikon is doing better now, and I’m especially loving the look of their fast prime lenses, but it’s too late to switch back over.
In a recent blog post I described going through about 5,000 pictures in Lightroom to get a portfolio ready for advertising on the Wedding Wire. The program allows for a five star editing technique to cull the pictures. At the end I went through and looked at what lenses were used for the 2 star level of editing. It was fascinating to see some lenses stand out in the number of times they were used for some of my favorite pictures and how the lenses were used to make the pictures.
Some weddings themselves really stand out for the sheer number of pictures I love coming from them. So you’ll see some repeated pictures from the same weddings.
Enjoy.
