Today afternoon was quite rainy. There were drizzling from time to time and then there were heavy rain too. Rain drops are one of my photographic interests. I like to shoot rain fall – the rain drops falling in slow motion. Or even better – no motion at all.
As rain drops fall from the sky, you can freeze them in motion with a fast enough shutter speed. Depending on how fast or slow you go, you can freeze the tiny drops of rain or you can have a little bit of trail of water drops.
Since we need to minimize our shutter speed, we need a Fast Lens, a lens that can bring in enough light so even at fast shutter speed, we don’t underexpose the scene. One of my favorite fast lenses are the 7artisans 35mm f/0.95. If you have read my older posts, you will notice I really like this lens. So when it was raining cats and dogs today, I took my camera, put on this lens and took some photos.
The above photo was taken at 1/4000 of seconds with an ISO 1600. I underexposed it slightly so the rain drops are more visible. In a gloomy, rainy day, even at that crazy fast shutter speed and low ISO, the photo didn’t become too dark. And I can make it very well lit in post processing if I want to. That’s what a f/0.95 lens can do for you!
This is the magic of fast lenses. They do not only produce a shallow depth of field but they also help immensely in low light or when you need to make your shutter speed super fast.
Speed boosted Nifty Fifty
Buying a fast lens like the 7artisans 35mm f/0.95 is an option. But if you’re on a Canon M50 like me, speed boosting EF lenses is another option. Speed boosting is not specific to this particular camera model though. It is technically possible to speed boost any full frame lens on a crop sensor camera if the full frame lens has a larger flange distance than the crop sensor camera’s flange distance. You can read about more technical details about these in my post – Adapters vs Speed boosters and Flange Distance.
The Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 aka the nifty fifty is one of my favorite lenses. As mentioned in the review of this lens, I use it both on a speed booster and an adapter. When using it on my Viltrox Speed Booster, I can set my aperture value (f-stop) to f/1.2 which is pretty fast. Here’s a couple of shots from this setup.
If you check the exif data from these two photos – the first one was taken at 1/4000th of a second. You can see round shaped individual rain drops in this photo. Because of the very fast shutter speed, you can see it’s a bit darker of the two.
The second photo was taken at 1/500th of a second. It got a bit of more light. But the rain drops look a bit long – pill shaped. It’s because our shutter speed was a bit slow. By keeping the shutter open for longer period, we can create even longer trails.
Pingback: Review: 7artisans 35mm f/0.95 - Masnun | Photography