Thanks to everyone for allowing me to ask so many questions. The learning curve for me is steep.

I was shooting photos with my new Nikon D3400, recently converted from film and sold my Nikon F2 and Nikormat and all of the lenses I owned, for the weekend celebrations of my mother in law who turned 100 years of age at the time. Lucky for me that most of the photos turned out just fine, for, sadly, she ended up dying a week later.

I was most often using a 50 mm f/1.8 AF-S lens on my Nikon D3400, Here is what the Nikon website states about the lens:


So far I have been very pleased with the lens. Photographing the party, I was fooled by the "autofocus" on several occasions and need to figure out what is the best for my use. I shot a "portrait" of 4 people using back focus to be sure one of them was in focus and the result was that only that one person was in fact in sharp focus, they seemed to be all in line to me through the view finder, and all in focus, so I thought. I shot at ISO 1600, hand held at 1/60 and f 1.8 from about 8 feet from them, flash pointed up for bounce effect. I am going to fool around with using different ISOs and see how high I can push it without getting too much noise, I wish that I had done that with this particular shot to enable me to close down the lens and gotten a little more depth of field. The camera finder and even the LCD doesn't really give you the feeling that any of the photo was out of focus.

Thanks to everyone for allowing me to ask so many questions. The learning curve for me is steep.

I was shooting photos with my new Nikon D3400, recently converted from film and sold my Nikon F2 and Nikormat and all of the lenses I owned, for the weekend celebrations of my mother in law who turned 100 years of age at the time. Lucky for me that most of the photos turned out just fine, for, sadly, she ended up dying a week later.

I was most often using a 50 mm f/1.8 AF-S lens on my Nikon D3400, Here is what the Nikon website states about the lens:

"A must-have for standard portraits and everyday use, the AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G is a lens that will absolutely surprise you. The 50mm focal length (75mm equivalent on DX format cameras) with a fast f/1.8 aperture allows you to capture stunning images with a shallow depth-of-field, letting your subjects stand out from their backgrounds. The AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G may soon become your new favorite lens."

That is why I purchased this lens. On my F2 I used a 50 mm 1.4 as my "go to" lens, a 28 mm as my wide angle, my 85 for portraits and I had a 300 mm for telephoto work. It does seem that when I upgrade to a full frame sensor, the 50mm f/1.8 lens will work fine, since they claim it is optimized for that, claim its format is Fx35mm which probably is Nikon's way of saying it is formatted for full frame sensor, it says compatible with Fx, Dx and Fx in Dx mode.

So far I have been very pleased with the lens. Photographing the party, I was fooled by the "autofocus" on several occasions and need to figure out what is the best for my use. I shot a "portrait" of 4 people using back focus to be sure one of them was in focus and the result was that only that one person was in fact in sharp focus, they seemed to be all in line to me through the view finder, and all in focus, so I thought. I shot at ISO 1600, hand held at 1/60 and f 1.8 from about 8 feet from them, flash pointed up for bounce effect. I am going to fool around with using different ISOs and see how high I can push it without getting too much noise, I wish that I had done that with this particular shot to enable me to close down the lens and gotten a little more depth of field. The camera finder and even the LCD doesn't really give you the feeling that any of the photo was out of focus.

I don't have any pp software yet, but I assume none would help with this problem anyway.

Any thoughts? Suggestions?

You should be more than intrigued, you should be flabbergasted. Like many things you will read on any forum, it makes no sense.

Just like bouncing flash off a ceiling will give a yellow cast. That could be true in a house full of smokers with a nicotine stained ceiling. Bouncing flash off a white ceiling should be fine.

I think President Reagan was referring to UHH when he said. "Trust - but verify"

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