Lenses are arguably the most important part of a photographer’s setup. Sure, you might have twenty-something megapixels inside your camera, but if you have junky glass in front of it, every single one of those pixels will look awful. Before you upgrade your camera, upgrade the lenses.
And think about fixed focal length lenses. They’re not as flexible as zooms, for sure, and these days modern lens design means that a good (read: expensive) zoom will be as good as a prime, or fixed, lens. So why bother? It’s all about the depth of field, baby. Zooms rarely have a maximum aperture of less than ƒ2.8. This is ok, but when you pop a prime with a bigger opening on your camera, say ƒ1.8 or ƒ1.4, you not only get more light (useful for night shooting) but you also get a very shallow depth of field. This means that you can keep your subject’s eyes sharp, but their ears, hair and everything behind them will be thrown into a distraction-free blur. The effect can be stunning.
I picked up a Nikon 85mm ƒ1.8D lens about a month ago. These lenses are a bargain at around $430 in the US. There is a more expensive ƒ1.4 model available, but it costs three times the price (although it has something of a cult following). The following is a short review, but instead of the usual product shots we take for these pieces, I’m posting a lot of images actually taken with the lens. Keep reading for the lowdown.
The photo above shows the Empire State Building in New York. It was shot wide open at 1/60th sec and ISO 1600 on a Nikon D700. Almost nothing has been done in post other than some sharpening for the screen. On the lights of both buildings you can see the beginnings of the modern amateur’s obsession, bokeh. It’s a Japanese word referring to the rendering of out of focus highlights by a lens, and discussion often gets rather flowery, with words like “creamy” being used. Despite this nonsense, the quality of these highlights makes a big difference to an image (and is one reason that Leica’s M lenses are so damn amazing).
This lens handles it well, but there are some odd color shifts in the highlights – to magenta in the foreground and to green in the background. This picture shows it better:
It’s a street in Barcelona, again shot wide open, this time at 1/125th sec at ISO 3200 and straight out of the camera (no post processing). Here you can see colored halos around the highlights, although the fact that the lights themselves are colored doesn’t help. The main thing affecting the shape of these highlights is the shape of the aperture itself. This lens has nine blades to form the aperture, so it has a pretty round shape.
This photo shows how dramatic the fall-off of focus can be. As lenses get longer, they already have a smaller depth-of-field. They also appear to compress the image, front-to-back, which makes for very flattering portraits (more on that in a moment). Here is a poster I saw on a lamppost in Brooklyn. You can clearly see that not even the entire piece of paper is in focus.
Speaking of portraits, this is my friend Whisky Tom. The long-ish lens is very flattering to the features and doesn’t distort them much (yes, his eyes really are that big). Remember how people’s faces change when you shoot with a wideangle lens? Their noses look huge, their faces distorted. The opposite happens at 85mm, and anything between around 70mm and 110mm is considered a “portrait lens”. See how the wide aperture throws his nose out of focus and completely blurs an otherwise busy background, drawing attention to the eyes which are pin-sharp (thanks to modern autofocus and the fact that I took these shots before we started on the inevitable whisky).
So how does it perform? Plastic construction means that is very light, and actually quite small. The lens comes with a large metal lens-hood (model number HN-23) which can be left on all the time to keep fingers away from the large front element. Internally, the lens uses rear-focussing, which means only a single group of elements at the back move when focusing. Combine this with a fast camera like the D700 and the thing focusses in a New York Second, letting you grab moving street-shots like the one above while walking. It really is fast, and very positive.
Most of the time, that is. Sometimes, when focusing on far away objects, the lens appears not to lock on. In fact, it doesn’t always seem to actually notice you have pressed the focus button. I am looking into this — focusing quickly on something nearby clears things up in the meantime.
In short, there’s no reason not to buy this lens. I totally love using it, and it seems that I’m not the only one who likes it. I was stuck on a Manhattan street corner, unable to leave because the light was so amazing, and a nice chap spoke to me. “Excuse me, that’s the 85mm ƒ1.8, right?” We had a camera-nerd conversation for a few minutes, and he loved the pictures I showed him on the back of the camera. If you’re rich, you could go for the highly recommended 85mm ƒ1.4. If you aren’t and you’re looking for something both fun and which will bring some interesting new elements to your pictures, try this one.
It’ll work on any 35mm Nikon, and full-frame digital Nikon, and on any crop-frame Nikon, although in the last case it’ll turn into a rather long 128mm lens. And if you have a Nikon D40, D40X or D60, you’ll have to focus it manually, as these cameras don’t have an internal focusing motor.
Product page [Nikon]
