Zeiss 35mm f/1.4 Classic Lens Sample Pictures

Moving in close and using a wide aperture is a technique that I love to use - creating a diffusely-blurred background. Just because your background is blurred does not mean that you can ignore what is in it. Here I attempted to place background sunflowers in composition-enhancing positions in the frame.
 
A circular polarizer filter was used to create the deeply-saturated colors - and to obtain a shutter speed within the cameras capabilites (by reducing some light).

Draw your viewer's eye to the intended subject by using a wide aperture lens to blur the background. Does the star garner your first attention?

You may not have control over the design, but if you park in the right location, you can indeed get a free paint job for your vehicle. This artistically-painted truck was parked in Chinatown in New York City (though I can't confirm that this is the artist's location of work). For this graffiti photo, I got down very low to the ground to capture a modestly-upward perspective.

A spectacular sunrise over St Mary Lake – I can't think of many better views for starting a day.

Well, this image is somewhat loosely-framed to be considered a head shot, but ... I still find the 35mm lens' angle of view too wide for a flattering tightly-framed portrait. Too much emphasis on the nose is the biggest problem.
 
This picture was captured on a sidewalk between tall buildings on a very cloudy day.

Battery Park City in Mahattan has some great architecture. These buildings are partially lit by sun breaking through a mostly-cloudy sky.

Glacier National Park has extremely dark night skies. On my next trip, I hope to take more advantage of these. This shot is of the parking lot light-lit St Mary Lodge.

The quantity of honey bees in this immense sunflower field was incredible. The honey bees were a welcome addition to my sunflower compositions.
 
One important piece of gear to take with you to a sunflower field is a step ladder. This allows you to shoot from flower height or slightly above. Unless you have an abnormally tall tripod, you are going to be shooting hand-held.

Want to shoot bright white subjects (especially reflective ones) under a full sun at f/1.4? You will likely need a circular polarizing filter or a neutral density filter to reduce the amount of light hitting the sensor. Otherwise, even the 1/8000 sec exposure available on Canon's higher end DSLR cameras will not be fast enough to prevent the whites from being blown.

A pair of featured New York City skyscrapers show contrasting architectural styles. City streets are typically cluttered with power lines, traffic lights, people, traffic and various other subject business. Try shooting up for a clean city image.

This dog has the unique passion of squeaker removal. Given a stuffed dog toy such as this soccer ball, the dog will immediately and strategically open a small area of the toy (one little patch in this example) and pull out stuffing until the plastic squeaker has been found and removed.
 
I could have used a wider aperture and lower ISO setting for this indoor night shot, but I wanted to increase DOF and to reduce the vignetting without using software to do so.

For a different perspective, I went under the curved Battery Park City fence in New York City to capture this shot featuring patterns. New York City is a good location to capture very-late-in-the-season fall foliage color. This shot was taken on Nov 11th.

You don't need a macro lens to fill the frame with a flower bloom when the flowers are this big.

An f/1.4 aperture opens up a great variety of creativity options for your photography.

Sunflowers are supposed to follow the sun throughout that day. Obviously this is not always true. In this huge sunflower field, I could only find a couple of sunflowers that faced the sun in the afternoon. These of course became my over-used subjects. Here I used f/1.4 to blur the entire rest of the field.

If the night sky is clear, Glacier National Park is a great place for photographing the Milky Way. A 30 second exposure is just long enough to create tiny star trails visible at full resolution. 20 seconds or less would have been a better choice at 35mm, but I wanted to maximize the visible star details.