Jim suggested the “nifty-fifty” theme as a challenge (mainly for himself) to not rely on a zoom lens or cropping. When photographing in college (a LONG time ago), he used a dslr with 50mm lens for many of his college photography projects. This theme was a chance to revisit using the limited gear you have instead of relying on a variety of gear. Although it was a struggle, using a prime lens has many benefits such as a faster aperture, shallower depth of field. He’ll continue to use a nifty-fifty or any prime and zoom with his feet when possible. But cropping in the final edit will be allowed cause framing perfectly in camera is often impossible for moving subjects.
Jim participated in both the Nov 1st Old Town Dios de los Muertos meetup and the Nov 5th UCSD Fallen Star moonrise. For the Old Town Dios de los Muertos images, he used a Fujifilm X100VI in 50mm mode to capture the portraits. This camera has a small built-in flash he used as fill flash to reduce shadows especially on backlit shots. This camera has a leaf-shutter so it can flash-sync at any shutter speed, even 1/4000. It has a 35mm equivalent fixed focal length lens, but can “zoom” (crop in-camera) to 50mm or 70mm.
For the moonrise, he used his Nikon Z8 with 100-400mm Nikon zoom. The two moonrise images he shared were exposure blend of two shots taken one right after the other (1sec f8 & 1/125 f8). The images were layered in Photoshop and blended.
Lastly, Jim reprocessed some sunset images from Grand Canyon North Rim he photographed in 2022 & Hawaii 2023. He hoped his improved Lightroom post-processing skills might make better final results.