Once I changed to the 35mm I made sure to show her some of the pictures I was taking with it and she loved them. Aberrations, the elimination of which was so doggedly pursued over the five year development period, are checked but not eliminated.

I’ve seen lots of up-and-coming photographers invest in this lens and then feel disappointed and ripped off when their images aren’t suddenly better. However, they are versatile and useful, especially for those who do not want to keep switching lenses. This is the sweet spot (along with f/8) where sharpness is high and fairly uniform across the image. Also, the bokeh on that 24-120/4 is really not very good (in agreement with the previous full review by Spencer). I’ve provided both Nikon Z lenses as well as the older Nikon F-mount counterparts for the best of both worlds!In fact, some wedding photographers prefer to just go with a single zoom lens for wide to telephoto range, as well as a telephoto lens like the 70-200mm to go with another camera body. We would literally play rock-paper-scissors to see who got to shoot the good glass and who was left with the third party lenses like Sigma. The reasons to get this 35mm lens are if you are traveling light or prefer a small, fast, fixed wide lens over a slower, larger zoom.

On the D700 body provided for this test, the lens suffered from an extremely serious front-focus issue, which could not be resolved with menu-based AF fine tuning. It’s great for any photographer who needs a fast 35mm lens for a full-frame camera, such as for weddings, events, and portraits.

Unlike with today’s autofocus lenses and automated cameras, in which the deepest interaction you’re likely to have with your lens is the removal of its lens cap, this Nikkor hails from a time in which lenses were intended to be handled and manually manipulated. There might be other cases where using a wide-angle lens is going to be required to be able to fully reveal the scene / location in which the newlyweds, or perhaps a group of people are located: NIKON D750 + 20mm f/1. I’ve gotten some purple and green fringing in high contrast areas, as shown in the unedited image above. As expected, the lens starts out a bit weaker wide open, with its overall performance increasing as you stop down. So if you like a nice blurry background and don’t care too much about sharpness, you’ll like this lens even wide open.

The outer barrel is made of plastic, but feels just like the expensive Nikon metal lenses, most likely due to the lens weight. Although there are plenty of great wide-angle lens options out there, I personally find the Nikon 20mm f/1.Not only due to its focal length, but also its comparably good performance in terms of sharpness and bokeh.

There are plenty of other optical characteristics that need to be evaluated, such as vignetting, chromatic aberration, distortion, etc. Coupled to the Nikon D700, as seen in the photo above, the lens doesn't look disproportionately huge, though.Coma ( saggital coma flare) often causes weird smeared blobs to appear around bright points of light in the corners of fast or wide lenses at large apertures. Due to the length of the lens, Nikon decided to go ahead with a very large focusing ring, which is great. It’s a lovely lens that delivers excellent image quality but you have to ask yourself how much you really need that extra two-thirds of an f/stop.