In Love with the 85mm

Nikon Z 85mm f/1.8 S @ f/1.8 1/25 ISO400

I took this after sunset while riding back on my bike. It is handheld with my typical manual settings. The bright lights make it possible to get a well exposed subject. A crop to 16x9 leaves about 15MP which is enough, even for prints. The motion blur is minimal at that distance. Of course, the IBIS helps to avoid camera shake.

Now, the 85mm is a focal length which renders everything well you throw at it. It is a rather narrow angle of view for an everyday lens, so you often have to step back. But if that is possible you are rewarded by a beautiful concentrated view on your subject with a nicely rendered, smooth background. 

f/6.3 1/400 ISO100

That is the reason why an 85mm lens is the typical portrait lens. You can get a very smooth background shooting wide open, at the cost of a very shallow depth of view. Often, it is is better to use f/4 to get more than one eye in focus, and even more importantly, to allow the user to understand the background. 

For this, you need to select the background wisely. It might be as important as the subject. The narrow angle of view of this light telephoto lens allows selecting the background even more than the 50mm, and much more than the 35mm. 

f/2.8 1/80 ISO1600

The quality of this Nikon Z lens is superb. Even closed down a bit, Bokeh balls look nicely rounded with only very smooth corners. They have just a tiny bit of a bright frame. And if you do not have spot lights in the image, the out of focus zones and the transitions look simply great.

The lens is also good for street photography. Photographers like myself, who are shy in the street get a nice focal length to work from some distance. Personally, I like photos that feel more observing. A 35mm will get you into the scene, being part of it, or even intervening with it.

The main advantage of 85mm is that the background will play the same role as the subject. 

You get a photo of some people in its environment, not something in close up view detached from its environment. This is totally surprising to some photographers. Many would argue that a wide angle shows more of the surrounding. It does, but it is also shrinking the background a lot, making it less important.

f/2.8 1/500 ISO100

The piano player is a typical scene. With a wider lens, the folks in the background would be much smaller and the buildings much larger. I find this scene works better with a longer lens.

f/2.8 1/800 ISO100

Can you do animals and wildlife? Not really. The picture above is a crop, and the dove was very close. But the sharpness of the lens helps to get very good results still. With a higher resolution sensor, you can call this lens 85mm to 135mm if you are satisfied with 20MP images.

The horse below is cropped even more. But modern sensors and a lens like this Nikon S gem are so good that I would not hesitate to print the image with 60cm width.

f/2.8 1/4000 ISO100, cropped to 5MP

The only letdown of this lens is the close focus distance. The maximal magnification rate is only about 1:7. Compare that to impressive 1:2 which you get with the Nikon Z 70-180 f/2.8 zoom at 70mm. For me, such a telephoto zoom is the main competition to the 85mm. It is more versatile and also offers a relatively wide aperture and smooth background, especially at the longer end. There are, however, measurable and even visible differences in sharpness and contrast. And the 85mm is more compact, lighter, and less intrusive.

All in all, this is a very nice lens. Almost everything and everyone looks good when shot with this lens. It is much easier to select a nice background composition and to isolate the subject.