About as current as it gets here at The Resurrected Camera, these date to the middle of May 2022, barely a month ago. My job hired me to capture portraits of the new drivers at the annual pre-season meeting, to be used on the website; these photos amount to the first professional work I’ve seen out in the wild in quite some time, perhaps ever. The meeting was held at the Cheyenne Mountain Resort and I used Cheyenne Mountain as a backdrop, shooting out on the patio in the shade of a building as the sun was setting. I got a few of the not-so-new drivers as well: all in all I made portraits of 15 drivers and include my favorites below:
Besides the cowboys (and cowgirl) themselves, the star of the show was the AI’d Nikkor-PC 105mm f/2.5 portrait lens which was used for all but one of the exposures above. There’s been so much written over the last 70+ years about the 105mm Nikkor so I don’t know what I can add except to say that I picked it up because it was cheap, I wanted to have at least one portrait lens, and it had a good reputation. I’ve used it for a few portrait sessions so far and have been extremely happy with the results, as well as that from my AI Nikkor 85mm f/2 lens (which also makes an appearance here). I would call either of these lenses a must-have for a Nikon manual-focus system, whichever you happen to run across first. If you can, get both.

I suppose this means that I can call myself a professional photographer, right? I’m hoping that this can be springboard me to bigger and better things but we’ll see.