Rolf's Second Post

"Yesterday at late afternoon I have had my first walk with Nikki and Nikon D800. Located nearby our house is a very old little church (first stones 1008 A.D.) and a 400 years old graveyard.

This graveyard is always one of my testdrives when I got new old lenses. Shooting the old gravestones it is easy to check the sharpness, mirco contrast, 3D capabilities etc. of the respective lens.

Sometimes the responsible parish will show a little exhibition of local artists at this graveyard too. Beside some exhibits inside the church actually 2 very special sculptures are located outside in front of the church.

At a first view they look like aliens but that was for sure not the intention of the artist. She named here sculptures in German „Seelenwächter 1 + 2“. The best translation in English would be „Soul-Guards 1 + 2“.

Anyway below few images of the soul guards.

 

 

All images were taken wide open at ISO 100. As you can see the lens is very sharp with excellent contrast. This will be more visible with the following images and depending the light situation the lens delivers good 3D effects too.

These old tombstones below were taken also wide open at ISO 100. The files were developed with my standard PP (mainly ACR, CS6 with little curve adjustments, final sharpening after resizing)

At a first glance I have to say that this is a wonderful lens producing great IQ. It is better than my ugly older version (see my first post) maybe due to better coating. For my taste I missed a more smooth bokeh wide open but this is of course a very personal point of view."

Rolf's First Post

"Yesterday Nikki arrived in Germany in perfect condition. Many thanks Philippe to provide me with this fine lens.

At first I would like to point out few words about my family and me, where we live and what I would like to do with this lens in the next 2 weeks.

My name is Rolf and I’m living with my family in the middle of North Rhine-Westphalia – which is the largest  federal state in Germany with around 17 million inhabitants.

Our location is a very old and small village within the  triange of Bochum, Essen and Wuppertal. Düsseldorf - the capital city of our federal state - is approx. 50 kilometers away as well as Cologne.

Since 1970 my passion is still the photography. I started at that time with a simple SLR made by Praktica. I was a poor student and more money for a „better“ cam was not in my pocket. In the meantime until now I tried out many different cams and brands. Today I work mainly with  Nikon cams but with other brands like Canon, Sony or Pentax also.

I like to collect old lenses which I use regular. That’s the reason why I’m here and because I’m very happy and proud to be one of the members of this project.

Because I’m number 5 or 6 within the list of photographers around the world I have had some time to think about what I will show here the next 2 weeks in my posts.

It is a rite to show at first few images of Nikki itself . Before I will explain my plans below „NIKKI“

The parcel was coming from Philippe at Nancy/France 

 and inside was a wonderful lens manufactured by Nikon around 1970.

 

On the next image you can see a part of that what I plan to do. I will give Nikki a try with an analog Nikon F5 and slide film. Even with this cam Nikki have a good figure.

 

But Nikki will work perfect with modern digital Nikon cams like the D700/D800 too.

 

NIKKI will be my only lens now for the next 2 weeks. Depending of the weather I will show in one of my posts some b&w images of an old steel mill nearby which is now a museum of industry. Furthermore we have here in our area hundred of old castles mostly perfect renovated. This could be a theme of another post.

Before I made few test images to get familiar with Nikki below an image with a brother (or sister ?) lens out of my collection. It is an older version of Nikki with non-Ai mount. I bought this ugly lens few years ago for a value like next to nothing and filed down the mount to something like Ai.

Anyway the glass and the mechanics are in perfect condition and I use this lens very often.

 

 

At the end of my first post 2 images out of my wifes garden to test Nikki with a Nikon camera."