Rodica – davide rizzo photography

From time to time I feel the urge to take lots of pictures and I find myself shooting very frequently and being less demanding. When on top of that I acquire a lens I’ve been wanting to try and own for a long time, every moment is the right one to go out and photograph.

During on of those lonely walk around the street of Paris I stumbled upon such an incredible character that, after taking a couple of shoots from a distance, I could not avoid stopping her and asking for a picture.

Rodica immediately mentioned she IS a model and she would not mind me taking her portrait, even though she “was not sure to have the right outfit”. It just took me less than a minute to capture some nice pictures, even tough on a couple of them I missed the focus on her eyes.

The pictures were taken using my beloved Nikon FM2n with a roll of TMAX 400 (shot at box speed) and developed in XTOL 1:1; but most importantly they were taken with the new baby on my collection, the gorgeous Carl Zeiss Distagon 35mm f2 ZF2, a lens I’ve been looking for quite a long time and finally managed to buy for a very good price on eBay.

The reasons I bought this lens is that I wanted to use the 35mm focal length and, although my Nikon 28mm f2 AI-S is very similar in rendition and perspective, the myth around Carl Zeiss micro-contrast won me over and convinced me to open the wallet. The construction is of course on the highest end and manual focusing is a pure joy. I decide to shoot three rolls of film exclusively with it (two TMAX 400 and a Fomapan 400) but also took it for a ride with my Nikon D810 (the “toy” camera I use with my children). With this high megapixel beast you can really appreciate the quality of the lens: the colors are just incredible, the contrast is just right and even at f2.8 and in a backlit situation (only one stop down from max aperture) there is no cromatic aberration at all, as you can tell from my son’s picture (image taken straight out of camera).

The short minimal focus distance suggest to use it also as a poor’s man macro lens but I wanted to try the color rendition against other lenses I own. The season of figues suggested me and easy (and yummy) composition to test four lenses against each other: