Awesome stuff! I love using the 50mm on my D3 (roughly equivalent field of view). 90% of my photos are done with it these days.
Right, so my pictures seem to have turned out pretty crap (blame alcohol at wedding and using my SLR as a happy snap cam.....) but will try and get some pics posted tongiht
If it's your first prime, they take a bit to get used to. You'll become a better photographer for it though. I'm almost exclusively primes now, even though I have a 70-200 f/2.8 sitting there.
Primes are a lot of fun to shoot and I'd even say once you get used to the field of view, it's a lot faster as well. I've not touched my DSLR kit for ages, the x100 gets taken with me everywhere.
It's my second prime, I have a 50mm which I love but it's just a bit too close 50% of the time, which makes it awkward for indoor shooting as no space to move back. Was hoping the 35mm would fix that and it does. However, I found it's not as sharp as the 50mm, nor did it manage to auto-focus as well on what I wanted it to focus on. Maybe it was me, but I found myself constantly having to jump to manual - which I don't like doing because my eyesight is crap and looking through the viewfinder I can't tell the difference between blurry and sharp.
Are you using it wide open? The Nikon 35mm is best around 2.8 and above for sharpness, wide open your D3200 may struggle to focus due to the very shallow dof as well.
On the night of the wedding I left it on full auto/no flash, mostly because I don't have the time to fiddle with settings.
It probably did try and shoot wide open then, try setting on aperture priority at 2.8 and see if the results are any better.
The sooner you move away from Auto the better in my opinion. There are times when its handy, but really you want to be shooting on A (aperture proiorty) and change your ISO and Aperture to suit. Otherwise you might as well have bought a mirrorless camera or even a good hybrid. You know you have that "programmable button" just under the flash option button? Its currently set to "timer". If you reprogram that to ISO you can change your ISO on the fly which will make life much easier for you. Personally I then have my aperture mode set to 1 stop down because I like the shadows to still be there. Have a go at shooting like this and you might find you get slightly better pictures. Well in all honesty for me I started of taking far worse pictures, and I've gradually improved, to the point where I am beginning to understand more of why and where my pictures can be improved, and why the pictures that go into the "photo of the day" section look so good. *Just to point out, I don't mean NEVER use auto, it does have its uses and can take a good photo, but you need to learn its strong and weak moments and why that is.
Yeah, I know where you're coming from. I spend more time in P/A modes now, but the advice I was given for weddings was to stick to Auto and play it safe; it's not a re-creatable situation.
THAT, 100%. I had my D5000 set up the same way. Now I'm on the D3, I have a dedicated button for it (and pretty much everything else!)
