My Wedding Photography Lenses Part 4: the 135mm
The 135mm lens is surprisingly useful for photojournalism style wedding photography
Before Nikon came out with the amazing 105mm f1.4 lens I wrote about in the last blog post I was feeling the equally amazing Nikon 85mm f1.4 lens wasn’t quite telephoto enough for my style of wedding photography. Before spending any money on lenses I comb through the online literature about lenses. I’m mostly interested in the lens sharpness, contrast, and blurry backgrounds. Almost as important, especially after my experience with the Nikon 105mm and other f1.4 lenses, and especially this lens, the Zeiss 135mm f2, I became almost as obsessed with autofocus speed and accuracy.
I absolutely loved the reach of this lens. Being able to reach in and really concentrate the importance of the subject in the frame without any distracting background information is what made this lens so important to me. But what made it great, the telephoto and the f2 blurry backgrounds, came at the price of manual focus only. Oy! How many shots did I miss?
Back in the day of when I was a student of photojournalism at San Francisco State and then when I was first working in newspapers at the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa all I did was manual focus for everything. The autofocus hadn’t really taken over the industry and a person needed to be fast and accurate with the manual focus. I was very good at it and figured it would be easy to relearn how to do again with this lens. I might have gotten better if I had been doing five assignments a day and only shooting manual focus, but wedding photography happens maybe once a week for me and I wasn’t getting the necessary practice. This resulted in me hunting and hoping for nice pictures. I frequently failed at the mission. So after four weddings I sold it and went back to the Nikon 85mm f1.4 until the 105mm came out.
But in those four weddings I made a surprising number of what I’m thinking of as 2 star photos. I’ve written numerous times in these wedding photography lens posts how I started with 5,000 pictures to try to get down to 20 and using Lightroom I went from zero stars to five stars. Then I started using the metadata and seeing what lenses were used most often. To do these blog posts I chose the 2 star pictures.
This lens, used for such a short amount of time, made quite a few nice pictures. The number of 2 star pictures this lens made really surprised me. It just has a nice look to the pictures.
So last year when I started being “camera curious” about maybe going lighter for my travel, landscape, and now wedding work with the Fuji system I went with the 90mm f2 lens (135mm equivalent). To be honest, I use that lens with the Fuji more often than the other lenses I have for it combined.
Here’s the 2 star photos from the Zeiss 135mm f2 lens. Enjoy!
