Bali Photographer / Thoughts and Portfolio

As I am getting more and more into photography, I started to think of more professional gears. So it was not making photography as a profession - the real meaning of professional itself - but more to get more pleasant results. Reasons for choosing this lens were:

1. Nikon. I preferred Nikon sub-class than pro-class of other brands like Sigma. I own an ultra-wide from Sigma, 10-20mm f/4.0-5.6 EX DC HSM, which whilst without thinking of throwing it away, I preferred not to get another Sigma in my bag, especially at the long range. Inferior optical performance and slow focusing were among the reasons.

2. Focal length. The focal length was perfect for close-up portraiture, with dead locking focus and pleasant bokeh. The theory was that you need lens below the eye’s focal length, which is 50mm, to get perfect shape. 80mm up was rather just perfect. Whilst I understood that 85mm, either at with f/1.4 or f/1.8 were better at its focal length, being able to zoom up gave better flexibility whilst allowing better bokeh, from increasing focal length instead of wider aperture.

3. Bokeh - combination between wide aperture and long focal length resulted in more pleasant rendering of out of focus area, popular as bokeh.

4. Aperture - wide aperture allowed to take picture in lower light. In low-light, one or two steps larger definitely worths. In theory, people could get perfect shot hand-held at the speed of 1/focal length, which means you need to shoot at a minimum speed of 1/200 second when using 200mm lens. If the light requires exactly 1/200 second in f/2.8, how much opportunities you would loose by using a lens with max. f/5.6, considering that to get the same light you have to drag down the speed by to stops, which was 1/50 sec.

5. Aperture (again) - f/2.8 allowed the lens to be used with tele-converter. At this aperture, usage of tele-converter was still allowing AF to perfectly work. Combined with 2x tele-converter the lens gave a doubled focal length of 160-400mm. TC dragged 2 stops of the maximum aperture, so here we were talking about f/5.6. 400mm f/5.6 was not bad at all. Compare to those with f/5.6 as the maximum aperture at 200mm, where usage of tele-converter disables AF and aperture 2 stops drags the maximum aperture down to f/11.

As most of Nikonians, I dream of the new Nikon AF-S VR 70-200 f/2.8G IF-ED, but priced at about 19 millions Rp. , it was definitely not at the same league as my pocket. So I had to look around, with similar optical performance - minus VR - and the fact that it was by far lighter, I decided to get Nikon AF 80-200mm f/2.8 D ED N, which was sold brand new at slightly less that a half of the new AF-S version. To save even more, I got mine used.

A few photographers tried to compensate wide aperture with VR, which allowed users to shoot at about 2-3 stops below normal shutter speed requirement by eliminating hand-shake. I personally did not but this theory as VR was all about eliminating hand-shake, (1.) you would not get the same bokeh rendering of f/2.8 by using lens with narrower aperture, (2.) combination with tele-converter would not allow you to get AF work. It also would not give you sufficient aperture when used in combination with tele-converter, (3) so good of VR lens with narrower aperture, imagine if you are getting wide f/2.8 plus VR.