Vintage Lens: Nikkor 35mm f/1.4

My quest for experimenting with radioactive lenses has led me to test this Nikkor 35mm lens. I liked this lens right off the bat because it’s a great all-around lens. 35mm is a focal length that satisfies many needs – and it’s a fast 1.4 lens as well!

Now, I’ve read some good reviews of this lens, so let’s see what it looks like in practice. First, it is a bit large – a bit longer than I’m used to for a 35mm lens.

But it is a beautiful lens, and (like many vintage lenses) all metal, and it feels like it. I was curious how sharp it was, so some of my photos initially tried to show how sharp it was – and all my shots are wide open at f/1.4, of course. Stopping down any lens will generally increase quality, but I was mainly interested in how it worked at 1.4.

I was generally pleased, but some shots displayed a bit more chromatic aberration than I would generally like. The backgrounds, at 1.4, were outstanding in most cases. Foreground bokeh was nothing to write home about – in my opinion.

So, let’s take a look at a few of my initial shots. It seems generally pretty sharp – but my lack of ability to focus precisely it apparent in many of my shots… my eyes struggle, even with peaking on. My setup is an EOS R camera with RF to Nikon adaptor.

Next, I had an opportunity to visit a local vintage aircraft museum and to photograph some of the planes. You can see in the photo of the museum hanger below, for distant subjects, the 35mm focal length keeps the image fairly sharp right to the edge. This is not cropped (well, only slightly to straighten the image) and the left and right edge are fairly sharp.

Now, once inside the hanger, I tried to shoot a few of the planes normally, but then tried some closeups of some of the planes to see how the bokeh looked. The fast 1.4 lens worked well indoors – most, if not all, were shot at ISO 400.

So, all-in-all, I really like this lens. It is one of the most radioactive lenses I have, so I don’t like to have it next to me for too long (I know, I know, it’s worse eating a banana, but radiation is just something that I’m not real comfortable with). But when I do use it, I like the results.

In my opinion this is one of my vintage lenses that I might use on a regular basis – whereas most of the others will not be used as much just because I’m not so impressed with their results – like I am with this lens. If you get the chance to use one of these Nikkor 35mm f/1.4 lenses, I recommend you give it a try, at least.