Malaysia travel blog: 85mm f1.4G in Little India
I just couldn’t help myself when I saw the difference in price. It wasn’t really planned for, but wandering around KL, mall after mall, I had an urge to check out lens prices. And it turned out that everything was about £300 cheaper than it is in the UK. So I thought I may as well take the plunge and picked up a sparkly new 85mm f1.4G Nikkor lens, and oh my goodness I feel like I’ve joined the party late because this is one hell of a piece of glass!
Anyway, once I’d convinced the wife that I absolutely needed this thing, I stuck it onto my D7000 and we headed down to Little India which is right next to KL’s main train station, KL Sentral.
Now because the D7000 has a crop sensor, the equivalent focal length of this magical lens is around 130mm and the equivalent DOF is f/2. The most important thing to remember is to have an adequate shutter speed to take this into account, so while I would shoot at a minimum 1/100s on a full frame camera with this lens, I put it up to 1/200s on the smaller camera.
There are two Little Indias in KL. This one is ‘New Little India’ and has some really nice arches lining each side of the street with a large roundabout at the end housing a massive statue of Ganesh, one of the Hindu gods.
This one wasn't taken with the 85mm but with my trusty GF1 & 20mm f1.7 instead.
Once you cross over into that road you can see the beautiful arches:
Just like real India.
Shot wide open at f1.4
Also shot wide open at f1.4. It's bananas!
To be honest there isn’t a huge lot to see on this street apart from the arches, but there are a bunch of Indian shops and you can get all sorts of things there ranging from Indian clothing to food and pirated Bollywood films, if that’s your kind of thing (it’s not mine). Here are a few more sights from the road:
The long focal length (130mm equiv on a crop sensor) compresses the scene nicely.
Wide open, indoors in a poorly lit restaurant.
I love how the 85mm lens is so dynamic and can give a really nice compressed perspective (as seen in the picture of the road above), or totally blow away a distracting background for some amazing portraits with available light.
The razor thin depth of field means you have to be super careful with your focus points, something I’m gonna have to practice more before I start busting this thing out in the field, but I’m definitely in love..
