Why a sharp lens matters - the 135 f/1.8 Nikon Plena lens

Winter plumage of red-necked grebe.  135 f/1.8 Nikon Plena lens

Photography is about creating an image, and the likelihood of getting a good photo increases with the quality of your equipment, especially lenses.  I am all for saving money but at the same time value quality.  Unfortunately, the two rarely go together.

I recently purchased an f/1.8 135mm Nikon "Plena" lens.  It is primarily a portrait lens, used for head and shoulder shots, as its wide-open curved aperture produces the most spectacular bokeh you can imagine.  The reason "Plena" is used has to do with its edge-to-edge sharpness.  Many of the reviews I read stated it was the sharpest lens anyone there had ever seen.

Not only is it sharp centrally, it is sharp at its edges, meaning that any photograph you capture will not show signs of a soft focus as you get away from the center.  I photographed a grebe yesterday and enlarged the full image (inset) almost 17x to produce the crop shown.  The details preserved in the bird are remarkable.

There is also no visible chromatic aberration, which can significantly impact how much enlarging you can do before quality takes a dive.  The combination of a very sharp lens with little to no CR is awesome.

The down-side to the story is that the lens is expensive, worth more than the camera it sits upon.  It turns out that this paradigm is common in photography; buy the lens you plan to keep, not the body.  I have had many of my lenses for years while I upgrade bodies frequently.  Too bad you can't do that with our own physical bodies (I would have exchanged mine in a few times now).

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com


 

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