Lensbusters.com

Who is this Sam Yang you ask?' Nearing the end of the year, it was time to buy some new business related gear.For part of my work, shooting people with blurry backgrounds is an important ability. I already own a good 85mm lens for my Sony E-mount system: the Zeiss Batis 85mm f1.8. And I own the Sigma Art 135mm f1.8, one of my favorite lenses. Despite amazing optical performance, the Sigma is not only a bit long for some work but really big and heavy. For a while I’d been eyeing a used Canon 85mm f1.2. There was a real deal on LensAuthority.com for a while that had minor scratches and a small filter ring dent. But I waited to long. Then I was contemplating the Sigma 85mm in Canon mount- so I could use for digital but also on my Canon film cameras.  In the end I bought a slightly used Samyang/Rokinon 85mm f1.4 lens for Sony. With Samyang/Rokinon it’s important to note that this is the autofocus version. This Korean company has been making good, budget manual focus lense

Recently I acquired an infrared converted camera. Somebody on Ebay converted a conventional Sony A5000 by simply removing the IR filter over the sensor. Unlike many professionally converted cameras, my IR camera does not have any IR filter over the sensor. So without a filter over the lens images don't look that different from a conventional camera. But I've been using a 720nm IR filter. To the eye the filter looks black. But through the camera you can see an image. And surprisingly the daylight exposures are very similar to conventional photography. One issue that is very much subjective about the use of digital infrared is how to process images. There's no way to be true to what you see, the IR world is magically different! For most of the IR work I've done so far, I've converted to grayscale. And unlike conventional photography, I'm ok with seriously moving those sliders around. Opening the shadows and pulling in the highlights to the extreme doesn't