It was a busy weekend with portrait shoots but I actually managed to find about 20 minutes to take some personal photos. One of my sessions took place at Chippewa Park so I decided to get there a bit early and walk around. With me I had my Nikon D610 and the 70-200mm 2.8 and 50mm 1.8. I usually don't walk around with these lenses as they are a bit on the heavier side. Anyone who has seen some of my previous posts know that I tend to favour the Fuji X-T1.
For the photos of the sleeping giant I pulled out my trusty 70-200 2.8. I obviously use this lens a lot for all my weddings and portrait sessions but it has been a while since I used it for personal photos like landscapes. The Nikon D610 isn't the highest end full frame camera by Nikon but it did an amazing job with sharpness and detail as well as retaining the highlights and shadows. One of these days I'm going to upgrade to the D750 and use the D700 solely as a backup camera but for now I'm more then fine with the D610.
For all the other photos I used the 50mm 1.8. To be honest I just started using this lens again and I have forgotten how much I truly love it, especially when paired with the D610. I used it for the first time on portrait session this past weekend and I came away with some fantastic photos. The bokeh produced by this lens along with the rich colours are amazing.
As with most of my photography I rarely set the lens past it's 1.8 setting unless I'm taking photos of groups of people. But when I am just walking around taking abstract photos I always try and pick out small details as you can see from the photos below.
As for procession, I worked with the native RAW files converted to DNG in Lightroom 6. From there I always start by using my favourite preset. Then I play with the contrast and clarity and colour enhancements. To be honest, the files don't need much work. Then I'll usually sharpen the images using NIK Effects along with a few tweaks in Viveza. It seems like a lot of post processing but I'm usually only spending about 1-2 minutes per final image tops.
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