Gear Review | Nikon Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 D

(I do apologize to all of you Canon-folk for my not being able to do a Canon gear review for you)

This is a very nice portrait lens! Though a tad on the heavy side, it’s fast and sharp, and can help you create crystal clear images!  It’s a solid metal lens, including the mount, with a plastic shell surrounding all the good stuff that’s inside!

The auto-focus on this lens is really fast! And spot on! I think one of the only things that I don’t like about it is that my hand tends to get in the way of the focus ring causing it to hesitate.

One of the things that I really love about this lens is the beautiful bokeh it creates! For those of you that don’t know, bokeh is the aesthetic quality of the blur in the out-of-focus areas of an image!

I think the only other thing I don’t like about this lens is that I have to be at least 3 feet away from my subject. I like to get close! Because it is a similar shape and size to the 60mm f/2.8 micro, I sometimes get frustrated when my lens won’t focus and then I remember that I’m not using the 60mm and that I need to back up!

Due to the crop-factor, this is not necessarily an ideal lens for a cropped-sensor body. It has the approximate field-of-view equivalent to a 129mm lens on a full-frame sensor.

This is an FX lens, and is fully compatible with all FX (full-frame sensor) camera bodies, and even some DX (cropped-sensor) bodies. Because this is an AF lens (not AF-S) it will NOT auto-focus on Nikon’s entry-level bodies including D40, D40x, D60, D3000, D3100, D5000, and D5100.

All images in this post shot with the D700 and the 85mm lens (except the picture of the lens).

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post and would like to follow my day-to-day photography, feel free to browse my blog or my facebook page! ~Beckie