I always get super excited when I receive email’s from camera brands. I might use another brand of camera myself, but, I’m always very open to trying different brands and models. When I got contacted by Nikon, I jumped at the chance to work with them and their awesome landscape lens, Nikkor.
My brief was to capture a spooky landscape using the Nikkor 16-35mm lens. They also loaned me the Nikon D7500. Many of my friends use Nikon so I was very excited to try out Nikon.
I took the Nikon to my local park to test it out. I was very happy with the results. I loved the VR (Vibration Reduction) on the lens. So often I shoot randomly, this means I don’t have time to set up a tripod especially when I’m travelling and exploring cities. The VR proved exceptional using slower shutter speeds.
Something else I noticed with the Nikkor was the sharpness. With 2 ED glass elements and 3 aspherical lens elements, the AF-S NIKKOR 16-35mm f/4G ED VR lens optical design achieves high-resolution quality throughout the entire zoom range for brilliantly sharp images.
The Spooky Image
I had a plan to go to a woods near me because tall trees and edited high contrasts always make for a good spooky image. However, as I was heading to bed one night, I saw we had some fog appear outside of my house. This made for a great option for a spooky image.
It’s amazing how a little fog, shadows, highlights and a spooky focal point can transform this normal view outside of my house. The one thing that totally transformed the image into the “spooky image” for the brief, was my daughter Poppy, dressed in white with her dolly looking super creepy. I’m so glad no one walked down the path seeing Poppy like that, it could’ve created some issues lol.
As spooky as the image is, it still needed some editing work to enhance the creepy feel. For this, I used Adobe Lightroom on my iMac to bring up the contrasts and enhance the highlights. A vignette also helped to create a dark edge to the image.
The image was captured using a long exposure of 1.6 seconds. This made Poppy slightly blurred. This wasn’t an issue because it helped create a ghostly feel to an already creepy shot.
After editing on my iMac, I then forwarded the image to my iPhone where I used the apps Snapseed, VSCOcam and Mextures to edit grain, light leaks and a grungey filter to help bring a darkness and old style to the final image.
Overall, the Nikon D7500 and the Nikkor 16-35mm Lens proved to be a great piece of hardware that served me well for this task. It will be a shame to hand it back.
Nikon Cashback
Nikon are currently running a “cashback“ scheme on all their lenses which will bring great discounts to anyone using the scheme. Click here to see the deal before it runs out.
I would like to thank Nikon for contacting me and getting me on board this great campaign. Myself and my daughter enjoyed creating this image.
