Completed my first eBay transaction yesterday and acquired a swell 105mm Nikkor AIS maro lens. It was cheaper than a proper macro like the Tamron 90mm or the new *drool* Nikon 105mm VR macro lens. The lens I got started production in 1984, and is the 2nd oldest thing I have acquired, the oldest being a 1981 bottle of wine for my friend’s birthday. That one was smooth and tasted good over a Japanese BBQ… okay, enough disgressing.

Heh, been itching to take macro pictures for a while now so I saw this lens for cheap and decided to get it, take some pictures first, and get a proper solution later (which is how a lot of my previous acquisitions have been). There is a thrill bidding for stuff on eBay, especially since it’s an auction style site, you never know how high the price will go. Learnt a few tips from watching a friend do it last time, and waited until the 11th hour (or the last 20 seconds of time remaining on the bid) before I placed my bid.

I have always been hesitant about transferring money to people I don’t know acquiring goods I wasn’t sure the quality of. You get to read about people reviews on how they performed in the past, and the guy I bid the lens off had a good reputation. All in all, paid the guy, he sent it via Express Post the next day, and I received it the following day. Pretty good I guess.

About the lens itself. It’s a really old lens. No CPU contacts for the lens, means there’s no metering whatsover (although the D200 and all the bigger brothers of the range can have metering). Without metering, I have to manually set the shutter depending on available light and hope an image pops up on the LCD screen. That’s the beauty of digital anyway, you can test until you get the right shot. Back to the lens, it’s a manual focus lens, with an aperture ring. Heh, not much to fiddle with and I soon got a picture out of it. Manual settings is a pain, as I have to worry about focus, aperture and shutter speeds before I do anything. Not the fastest way to take a picture, but it’s a good learning process I guess. The biggest setback about the lens that I only realised when I started playing with it was the inability to use flash on pictures. It only just occurred to me that the camera’s flash unit is tied in with the meter and they need to talk to each other so as not to create just a blast of light in the picture. Even with f/2.8, in low light this is a hard lens to use, as the focal length of 105mm means I have to stop it to at least 1/100s to get a still picture (unless of course you get a tripod, which is about time I got one).

Overall, the lens is pretty swell. Made of metal (it’s quite heavy), has pretty good optics (f/2.8 plus decent sharpness but has weaknesses with flaring against bright light) and does macro (although only a 1:2 reconstruction)! Heh, will be taking a lot of flower pictures soon I hope. This is an interim lens until I get a chance to go back to KL and acquire the real gem, a Tamron 90mm macro lens (which takes outstanding portraits as well by the way).

On a side note, need to find out what the focal lengths mean, heh. Friend asked the difference between 28mm and 500mm. I know one is wide and one is zoom, and that one captures a wider frame than the other. Knowing zilch about WHY that is at the moment. Heh, fun!