Last week I was browsing the camera section of a local electronics store when I had to do a double take. Sitting right in the display window was a 50mm Nikon lens with the magic number F1.2 on it. Manual focus only, but still, F1.2! It didn't take me long to trade in a lens I rarely used, and not long after that the 50mm was sitting on my camera where it has hardly come off since.

If you're reading this and you're not photographically minded, F1.2 refers to a lens which can do a couple of things in particular. Firstly, it can take in a whole lot of light, which means you can shoot in very dark places without having to boost your camera's ISO (sensitivity to light). Modern cameras have amazing performance at higher ISO, but generally speaking it's better to leave it as low as possible, and this lens allows me to do so. The other thing it can do is to render backgrounds totally blurred and out of focus, so the subject of your photograph is brought to the front and "pops". Good for portraits and other things which don't move, and for giving an artistic twist to a photo which would otherwise be pretty plain (there will be several examples of such photos).

Accurately focusing a lens like this at F1.2 is difficult. My main camera now, the Nikon D7000, has a very good viewfinder, but even with that it's not really enough to get the focus right on. Getting the focus dead on with only the screen is more luck than judgement - and I have very good eyesight. This is where the camera's live view function comes in very useful. Once I started using that, I was getting much more accurate focus. Still not always a hundred percent, but nearly always accurate enough for what I was aiming at.

Most 1.2 lenses have problems associated with shooting in such a wide open position; you get purple bits around light sources and so on. Too bad, that's the price you pay for being able to shoot at 1.2. You can always convert to black and white, and sometimes it looks better if you do so anyway. Everything's a compromise in photography.

1.2 isn't the widest-open lens on the market, btw, there are 1.0s out there and Leica have made a 0.95, which requires the average person to sell their car to afford. But 1.2 is plenty exotic enough for me at the moment!

Anyway, here are some of the early shots with the new lens. Unless stated otherwise, every photo here was shot at 1.2, and most, if not all of them using live view.

This is from a local temple, a short walk from my apartment. Live view gets you the precise focus on the first pole, and the lens does the rest.

Stall at a festival, converted to black and white. This one is less about background blur and more about the lens collecting lots of light. This was shot at ISO 500, and it was DARK. With a normal lens I would have been at somewhere around 2,000 or above.

Street musician. Again, I used live view to get the musician in focus, and I knew that if I got that right the rest would be fine.

A different temple. This was the first shot I did with live view and it convinced me that at 1.2, live view makes focusing a very great deal easier.

The same temple as in the first picture. Normally this would not be something I would shoot. A post. Pretty uninteresting. But shoot it wide open at 1.2 and you get something a little more interesting.

(Charlie Brown voice) "I got a rock". Again, I wouldn't normally shoot a rock, but when you have a 1.2 lens on the camera, even ordinary things take on a somewhat interesting flavour.

You can play a fun game with this one - "find the flower I actually focused on". Hint : I can't remember.

Cute. Pity some lowlife dumped it in the local park. Fortunately, there are people there who take care of abandoned cats. That's one half of the problem solved, the other half being hunting down and imposing a fine of a year's salary on the people who abandon kittens. Might make them think twice, but then again people who do this kind of thing probably don't have much in the way of cognitive function anyway.

 The live view really nailed the focus on this one.

Flowers in church. Self-explanatory.

Thanks for looking, feel free to comment!