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20th heaven

Of the many manual focus lenses I’ve pressed into service with my D300 series camera’s over the last 8 or 9 years the one lens I never used other than once just to see if it had not been compromised by fungus, was my 20mm f2.8.

A brilliantly performing optic, as most Nikon lenses from that time were, I still could never justify bringing it along on a trip. As with all my other manual focus lenses, it looked less sharp on my DSLR bodies than my auto focus lenses did, because the Nikon engineers who designed them 30 years ago, never had to account for an anti-aliasing filter lying between the lens and the film plane when creating them.

Today’s engineers do account for it when designing their modern auto focus lenses, and adjust their design of the lenses to compensate for it. Add to the fact that my 20mm was designed to do one thing above all else, give me as wide eyed a field of view as possible, without warping straight lines. But that would only work with a full framed camera. On my cropped sensor D300’s it became a 30mm or so lens. And I had wider zooms that were better adjusted for anti-aliasing filters than this so it was always left at home.

But now that I own a brand new D810 (thanks Scott!!!) in addition to my new D500, I finally have a full framed camera once again. And the icing on the cake, it has no anti-aliasing filter. It does have a stunning 36 mega pixel sensor.

So now when I want to capture a scene that requires a wide field of view and I don’t want to warp my straight lines, I attach my 20mm nikkor and it’s just like shooting on Kodachrome 64 like in the old days, only better. Because back then I would have had to stick this rig on a tripod to get a shot like this on a cloudy day. However today I just pumped the ISO up to 5000, and still got this image quality, hand held. My 20mm never had it so good.

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