A fast low-light capable lens and one that requires no assistance from fill-flash: The Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 Manual Focus lens is a lovely piece of engineering made from real metal and real heavy glass. A nicely balanced lens, and it makes beautiful photos though it is a difficult lens to use. The extremely shallow depth of focus requires very precise focusing and this is a bit of a problem after having gotten used to the line of fast modern Nikkor AFS lenses. The “creamy” romantic images that this lens creates are still wonderful for me though. Today I shot this lens almost wide-open and with the camera set to “JPG Vivid” and ISO at 200. The slow-shutter was intended and deliberate - to get a bit of the movement [maybe I captured too much motion though, ouch! what happened to those hands?] of of the percussionists. I opened the images in PS-CS4 and was done with any post-processing in a few seconds per image, all I had to do was just re-size and add a touch of sharpening … done. Cake-walk. Am tempted to go 50mm and “JPG” for a lot of the indoor concert type photography that I might do in the future.
[Click this photo above, for a larger view.]