 I've got a new lens. Let's try it out. My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. But with bills to pay and a family to feed, I decided it would be better to be a working photographer than a starving artist. So I took a job as a photojournalist. 25 years and thousands of assignments later, it was time to go back to my first love. Come along as I follow my passion trying to create art that shows the essence of nature in a photograph. I'll be sharing my successes and my failures in hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Ride in the Edge. I'm revisiting a few locations that I've photographed in the past with different lenses. I only have about an hour this morning, so I'm so anxious to use this lens. So excited to get back out here. I'm just going to make a few quick shots and then we'll have to head home. Just love the way the lights filter into the trees in this foggy morning. A little bit of mist through here. I don't know if it's going to show up. It's a good morning to be out. I wish I had more time though. The lens that I bought is a 28mm. This one happens to be the Nikon 28-1.8G lens. It's their newest 28 before they went to the Z-mount. It's a fairly modern lens and it's kind of expensive for what it is. But I felt like if I was going to buy something I wanted, something that would be able to go with me for a while. So if I did go mirrorless, I could put an adapter on this and use it. The next thing is I'm going to be using just this lens for a while. I want to get to know this focal length again. I started my photography career with 28mm. That was 30-plus years ago. This was the first wide-angle focal length that I went with and I used that only as my wide-angle lens for probably about six years. I've used only one wide-angle lens for 35mm and that was a 20mm. When I left journalism, I left the wide-angle zooms behind. I wanted to try something different. I wanted to go back to working the way I used to when I ever started and that was with a prime lens. I thought the 20mm was all I needed. If you follow this channel at all, if you've seen any of my videos, you may have heard me say that I'm working between 20 and 50. I just felt like there was just a little bit too big a jump and there are times where I'm in the woods especially that the 20 is just a little too wide. I'm hoping this 28mm kind of fits that role because my go-to woods lens when I want something wide. It's a wide-angle lens, but it's not real wide. As it usually is with me in my budget, to make room in my budget for this lens, I had to give up something. I had to sell a piece of gear. The only way I could afford this lens was to sell something photography-related. It always hurts to give up something. If I didn't feel like this was an important piece of my vision, of my creativity, I probably wouldn't have been willing to give up what I did give up to get this lens. So it's got some big shoes to fill. Now, I didn't give up a lens. I did give up something else though that was kind of dear to my heart, but glass comes first. One of those times where you're not photographing beauty, this is more of a documentary-type shot. The ugliness, the stupidity of man. Yeah, right here. This little patch of grass growing out of this old, dilapidated stunt got my attention. I was shooting it as a part of the landscape, and then I noticed this poking out. It just seemed like an interesting piece of contrast. The sidelight. And I'm always attracted to subjects that are trying to make a living. That little patch of grass is making a living right here on this dead, old, ancient tree stump. And I find that appealing. Something nice about this lens is it focuses really close. So it's allowing me to get some nice close-up shots, making this a really versatile lens for just about any kind of photography. If you look real close, there's little drops of dew on the outside edges of these plants. It's kind of cool. Not a lot of total range difference here, but it is kind of a cool repeating shape and pattern. Why this 28mm? Why this version? As I stated before, I started out with a 28mm when I started journalism. What I did not know when I started with that 28mm lens many years ago was it was one of the worst versions of the 28mm Nikon has produced. Well, at least according to the internet. Honestly, it served me well for about six years. I made some decent shots with it. I don't have any complaints. But now I can do some research. And I've, looking at the lenses out there, there still isn't a lot of great 28mm from Nikon. You have to go back to the manual focus lenses to get well regarded 28s. And I decided I wanted something that fit in my lens lineup seamlessly. I already have three other AFS-G lenses from Nikon. So I had a really good idea what this lens is capable of. I have no complaints with any of my other lenses. I think that because this lens, and most of the other ones that I have, are an ART metal construction that turns people off and they feel cheap and they're not durable. I picked it because of that. I like the lightweight nature of this lens. And I also like that it has a built-in autofocus motor. Now I don't really know what other manufacturers do when it comes to autofocus. But something that Nikon has implemented is the ability to manual focus even though it's on autofocus. You can fine-tune focus while you're shooting, whether it's on autofocus or not. And as I used these lenses also in journalism, I found that to be a very useful tool. So that's how I'm used to shooting. When I shoot can't hold, I'm always fine-tuning the focus point. Now I'll probably still manual focus most of the time. That's just what I usually do, especially with wide-angle lenses. But it's nice to have the ability to go autofocus if you need to. And this does manual focus pretty nice. The manual focus ring is very damper. Not as smooth as a manual focus lens, but very functional. This lens fits well with the other lenses in my arsenal. When I pick it up and use it, it feels very familiar. So I thought before I finish this video, I would try this lens on a crop sensor camera. That gives this camera, with this lens, the equivalent of a 42mm, I believe. A normal lens. Just to find out if this is a lens I want to use with this size sensor. The normal focal length can be pretty useful at times. I mean that this is such a light lens. It hardly feels like there's anything here around my neck. I've only got a couple shots, but I've got enough to know that this lens on this camera body works really well together. Something I'll probably do a lot more in the future. If you can't tell, I'm quite pleased with this purchase. This is probably going to be my default lens, no matter what camera I'm using. So I think we're going to end this video right here. I'm going to get home and do some editing. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.