Nikon Z 14-30 f/4 - First Days

 

The lens appeared in 2019. I would be bit late to review it here. So, this is just my personal experience after a few days. To start with, the build quality of the Nikon Z 14-30 f/4 is very good, and the optical quality is great. Every review I read so far was positive. The 24-30 f/4 might be surpassed by the Nikon Z 14-24 f/2.8, but I don't want to test that for double the price. There is no value in spending 2000€ on a lens for me, and I see no point in f/2.8 besides Astro photography.

It is a real challenge to compose with lenses that wide. That's why I never dared to go below 24mm. Anything below 20mm is clearly a special kind of photography with special demands. If you are not aware of the problems and are willing to learn you will be disappointed.

The main feature of such a lens is that it makes the foreground large and the background small. Thus, a wide scene will look boring if it has no foreground. This is not a lens just for getting a lot into the picture. You definitely need an interesting foreground which cooperates with your background by leading lines, framing or other means. Think of foreground, background and even the sky as parts of your picture which you need to balance and carefully position in the frame.

Now, you get the idea of the picture as stretching from the closest subjects to the far horizon. But the next problem is that even at 14mm not everything is automatically sharp. You need to focus correctly and use a closed aperture, maybe even f/16. And for the foreground to work, it must be really close, like one meter or so. I found that an immense challenge. And not every scene allows such wide angle compositions. There are always overlapping elements to avoid. 

Isolating by blurring does not work in landscapes at 14mm, not even at f/2.8, which my lens does not even feature. But if you get really close, you can  get blurred backgrounds as in the following shot.

Due to the construction of this specific lens, the background is somewhat busy, but not in an unpleasant way. but one needs to be careful with the scene for the image to work. Note that this is really close. We are talking about a few centimeters.

If you want to use the lens for party pictures indoors, you can. These days, everybody takes the smartphone for those shots. Mine has a 13mm equivalent lens with an aperture around f/2.2. This means that a full frame sensor needs around f/14 for the same DOF, maybe even more. You will have to crank up the ISO a bit, but the smartphone does that too, and your full frame sensor is way better in handling high ISO.

The wide field of view can yield pictures that are not possible otherwise, but have their own challenges. In the image below I was actually reflected in the mirror of the train. I had to clone myself out to avoid the distraction.

Often, the DOF is not sufficient to get everything sharp. In the image below, the paintings at the entrance of the tunnel are somewhat blurry. Of course, you could use f/16 and a high ISO, and carefully focus on some point half way to the runners. But if you do that on Auto ISO you might trick it to use a long shutter speed. Nikon's Auto ISO can use the one over focal length rule. But the result is around 1/10.

So far about my first experiences with wide angle photography. There are no epic landscapes yet. In Madeira, I did not have such a lens, and missed it.