

My wife Abby and I live on a pretty little patch of green in southern Oklahoma. I garden, tend an orchard, and walk our dogs in this bucolic paradise. I have always enjoyed photographing this land, and when the light is right, it can yield some of the best fine art images in my portfolio.
Lately I’ve been grabbing lenses known for their dream-like imaging capabilities, lenses with large maximum apertures that can produce flattering “bokeh” in the out-of-focus areas of the image. Recently, those lenses have been the AF Nikkor 180mm f/2.8, the AF-S Nikkor 85mm f/1.8, the AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4, and the AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.8.
In the past few days I’ve made a point to lug around my rare and beautifully-made Nikkor 200mm f/2.0 of 1985 vintage.
An interesting phenomena for me is that I get this lens out with the intention of using it, then don’t really use it. The whole point of shooting with this behemoth is to use it at f/2.0, “wide open,” and at this setting it is quite unforgiving. If I miss the focus by a few millimeters, the image is unusable.


With a beautiful late-summer sun setting one day this week, I ran into the house after walking our Irish Wolfhound and watering the garden, and grabbed the 200mm, and ran back into the yard just in time to take advantage of the golden moment and this rare, special lens.
Sure enough, when I reviewed my images after dark, half of them were unusable due to subtle focus errors. The images that were in perfect focus were magnificent, subtly sharp in a dream-like way that made the light on the leaves absolutely sing.
An oddly enduring myth about this lens is that it has “good” or “beautiful” bokeh. This is the classic mistake of confusing selective focus with bokeh. This lens has over-the-top selective focus, since f/2.0 at this focal length can throw the background so far out of focus, but if you examine the bokeh, defined as the quality of the out-of-focus area, you can see that it’s ratty and cluttered.

If you are willing to redefine “bokeh” as simply being all the way out of focus, every lens has “great bokeh” if you just use empty blue sky as the background.

But the main reason I seldom use this magnificent lens is its weight, more than five pounds, all of it in the front. It is a bear to use handheld, and awkward to use on a monopod. It’s easy to say that I don’t like heavy lenses now that I’m older, but I’ve never loved lugging them around, and doing so creates a payoff of diminishing results: huge lenses are only marginally better than not-so-huge lenses.
Finally, no, I don’t ever want to sell it. It’s one of the best examples of cameras from years ago, when lenses were made to last a lifetime.
