Ah. The ancient Nikon 20mm f2.8 D wide angle lens. Maybe it was the adapter.... Maybe it was the operator.... A bad shooting day?

A friend gave me a lens. It's the Nikon 20mm I mentioned yesterday. After a long day of accounting and chasing down vendors so I could pay them in a timely manner --- I decided to put the lens on an adapter I have and to walk around the downtown area taking random photographs. I came back with nothing spectacular or even very good. But I did come back with some thoughts about the lens and maybe an appreciation of how far lens design has come since the 1990s. At least where wide angle lenses are concerned. 

I used the lens, with adapter, on a Leica SL. It's a camera famous for the thin glass stack on the imaging sensor which is supposed to give better edge performance with Leica's huge selection of legacy lenses that were designed to work best on the more forgiving medium of film. Seems light rays hitting film emulsions tangentially aren't degraded in the same way they are when interfacing with the pixel wells in digital cameras. The thin stack wasn't enough though to bring this lens into the excellent or stellar category.

Like most lenses of just about any in the modern, multi-coated era of lens design the 20mm has a sharp central area and only really falls apart near the corners. At f2.8 the performance overall is mediocre to just good. At f5.6 and f8.0 it sharpens up, increases its contrast and looks decent. On all the images I took there was vignetting in the corners. In the very far corners the vignetting was massive and dense. Sure, you could crop but why not just start with a fully corrected 24mm lens in the first place?

One thing the lens has in quantity is distortion. And the distortion is not the easy to correct barrel distortion but the more pernicious mustache distortion. With a lot of patience and some talent in post production one could go a long way toward correcting it but..... again....there are better options at hand. 

At f8.0 the lens is capable of high sharpness in most quadrants of a frame and the trick is to use a camera with a good manual focus magnification feature. If you punch in as far as you can you can make images come alive with detail. But careful focusing is critical even when considering the vast depth of field the lens and aperture provide. 

The pros of the lens are: that it can be found for not much money. Samples are rampant at around $200. The lens is very light and very small compared to more modern (and more corrected) lenses. The focusing ring on my samples was smooth and had a short focus throw which is really neither a plus or a minus.

The negatives include that the focusing ring is hardly damped at all and feels different than most manual focusing and AF lenses with nice focusing rings which provide some tactile feedback. MF was definitely an afterthought on these lenses. But the flip side is that a short focus through and a very light MF construction probably increases the autofocusing speed a lot. The "cons' also include the fixed vignetting and the geometric distortion. Which largely disqualifies this lens as a choice for serious architectural photography. 

In a side-by-side, quick test I have to say that the Panasonic 20-60mm kit lens is better when used with any L mount camera because both vignetting and distortion are corrected in camera, via software. If I needed good technical performance at 20mm I'd grab the zoom first. But really, if you hang out at 20mm a lot then something like the Sigma 20mm f2.0 Contemporary might be the best choice for overall optical performance in the system. I owned the 20mm Art f1.4 Art lens from Sigma for a while and at most of the wider apertures the vignetting is bad enough to show through even with in-camera corrections. I'd rather have a better corrected lens with a more modest aperture. I could never really divine the value of the f1.4 aperture on a such a wide lens...

On the other hand this lens does have a lot of character. If you have an editorial use for the lens it could be fun. I'm withholding final judgement on this lens until I have the opportunity to shoot it on a sunny day and until I have more experience with it on the various L mount cameras. 

some might suggest that the lens adapter may be responsible for the vignetting but it's not a hard, mechanical edge as a physical blocking would cause and there is photographic detail if you take the time to correct for the vignetting in post. 

It was a fun distraction from an otherwise busy and fussy day. 

f5.6 at ISO 12500. 

ISO 12500. 

 I am looking forward to using this lens in good light.

I think the color rendering can be quite nice. Some of that is 

down to the camera....

New lens (to me) arrives suddenly and unexpectedly.

 

Again...it was cold, damp and the day featured endless, plodding rain. The little heater in my office barely kept up with the falling temps. I put on my boots to keep my toes warm. I worried about seasonal affective disorder until I remembered that I live in central Texas and that next week it might be in the 90s with bright sun. Not time to cover up that air conditioner just yet...

I'd just wrapped up the first stage of accounting on last week's three projects. The first stage being the payment of all the vendors, the talent agency, assist, make-up, etc., etc. The fun billing happens today when I send the clients the final bills. But it's always anticlimactic when shoots are over. 

My friend, Paul called to see what I was up to and to suggest an afternoon coffee at our usual joint, Trianon Coffee. It's just up the street from my place. I usually walk but not in a chilly downpour.

Paul is also a professional photographer so we sat with hot beverages and groused about the state of the industry, the inevitable changes in commercial work, the scarcity --- post Covid --- of assistants and support crew, the continuing ascendency of video, health insurance and retirement planning. And, of course, most of the conversation centered around cameras and lenses. We just about had everything figured out....

Near the end of our coffee conversation he pulled a plastic bag out and slide it across the table to me. "Here..." he said, "You might want to play around with this. If you want it it's yours." I opened the ZipLoc bag and pulled out a Nikon 20mm f2.8D lens, complete with caps and and a hood. Also a Nikon filter. 

I just happened to have a Nikon to L mount adapter in the studio so I mounted up the lens as soon as I got home. I remember owning one of these lenses back in the days of film, using it to good effect shooting interiors when the jobs called for it. I also owned the Canon version and liked it equally well. 

I didn't remember that the Nikon 20mm was so small. And lightweight. The focusing ring is almost completely undamped but that's typical for "D" lenses from that time. AF was becoming so popular I'm sure few people ever bothered to use their lenses in a manual focus mode. And in the early days of digital focusing medium speed wide angle lenses through smaller, lower res viewfinders was a complete game of hit or miss with "miss" nearly always winning. 

Since I recently gave away my TTArtisan 20mm lens and kept my Panasonic 20-60mm lens for occasional wide shots I was happy to have, once again, a prime lens for those times when you just want to distill your shooting experience down to the absolute fundamentals. And limit yourself to one focal length.

If the weather breaks and my work life slackens I'll head out this afternoon to give this lens a tour of downtown Austin. I hope it's as nice an optic as I remember. Nikon sold a huge number of these so they couldn't be that bad. 

Thanks Paul! Always fun to play with something new even if it's old.