This article was originally posted in 2015, but this update reflects the fact that I recently purchased another Reflex-Nikkor 500mm f/8 lens.

In the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, I had a Reflex-Nikkor 500mm f/8 lens. The optical formula is known as a catadioptric, or mirror, lens. Astronomers know about this type of optic, but despite being a relatively cheap way to own a long-focal-length, lightweight lens, this design has fallen very much out of vogue with photographers because of a several significant shortcomings…

• The maximum aperture is small, typically around f/8, and because of the optical design is the only aperture available.
• Significant vignetting – darkening at the edges, so the f/8 is only f/8 in the center of the image, and the corners are more like f/16.
• The “bokeh,” or quality of the background, isn’t just ratty or ugly, it can be, in some circumstances, downright unacceptable.

I found that in the years that I owned it the first time, my 500mm sat at the bottom of a bag of “extra” lenses I kept in the trunk of my car, and I seldom got it out and used it. By 1997, I had the magnificent Nikkor 400mm f/3.5 ED-IF, which combined with a teleconverter to form a 560mm that was very sharp.

However, like a lot of Nikon lenses I sold, I started missing the 500mm, so I kept tabs on them on Ebay. For a long time, they were commanding a very high price. But with the development of cheap superzoom lenses for the ever-growing mirrorless camera market, prices finally fell, so I grabbed one. I got it from a seller in Japan, and this particular one is in almost perfect condition.

I put it into service the next day, and it was everything I remember: a sharp, lightweight, manual-focus lens.

Being able to focus a lens is a dying skill, but one I personally keep alive. This lens is among the more challenging to focus because the depth-of-field is razor-thin, and the focus throw, the amount you have to turn the ring to focus, is very long. It needs to be, since long focus throws let us carefully fine tune our focus spot.

Of course, we come back to the idea that mirror lenses produce those obvious doughnut-shaped out-of-focus areas, often called, correctly so (for a change), doughnut bokeh. It can work against you, but if your backgrounds are less cluttered and darker, it’s less of an issue.

One thing that makes this 500mm better today than in the film days is that you can amp the ISO on digital cameras so you can marry the constant f/8 with a fast shutter speed.

I can’t truthfully say I recommend this lens, since there are many better options today, but buying it and using it again after all these years scratched a bit of nostalgia itch. I’m glad I got it.

Photography is both a fickle mistress and a moving target. One day pictures of models atop mountains are the big thing, then the next big thing is a picture of grass on your knees. Social trends have always been like this, but the speed of the webscape tends to amplify it.

I happen to think there is still room for the classics, and one of those is a basic wide angle lens. In fact, I talked about my favorite wide angle lens just last week.

In the middle of this conversation, a fellow photographer excitedly told me on the phone that he’d just bought a 28mm f/2.8 lens for his Nikon Z5. The Z5 has a 24mm x 36mm sensor, so 28mm is right in the middle of the standard wide angle range. He sent me a couple of photos of him unboxing it, with pictures of the lens itself.

The most obvious difference on the outside of the new Nikon lenses for their Z series mirrorless cameras is their austerity. There are few controls on these lenses, as almost all the functions are controlled by camera buttons and dials, or camera menus. It makes them look a little bland and blank, but also slick and post-modern.

Also oddly un-lenslike for us old timers is the design that front element very small compared to the overall size of the lens. We grew up admiring and owning lenses that sported very large front elements, and believed they were the hallmark of a great lens, and make the lens look more capable and commanding.

I expect the tiny front elements are a result of design efforts for lenses in smartphones, and the computer designs for making very small lenses translated well to photographic lenses in general.

Finally, my friend sent a photo he made within an hour of getting the lens, an image of a friendly bulldog on a sidewalk, and the image is flawless.

A buddy of mine recently dropped and destroyed one of his favorite wide angle lenses, an AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.4G, which he called his “butter 35.” The nickname described the way this remarkable lens rendered out-of-focus areas.

It got me thinking about my own wide angle lenses over the years, how I use them, why I like them, and which ones have emerged as my favorites over the years.

In the film era, I shot a lot with the Nikkor 24mm f/2.0, which was the staple of most of us news photographers. It was one of those lenses that I literally used up and sold almost as scrap, which I think is the perfect fate for a truly great piece of artistic equipment.

Also in my bag during most of my film-era photography was a Nikkor 35mm f/2.0. It was also a staple of news photography back then, serving as a more popular and versatile “normal” lens than the ubiquitous 50mm. I used it up as well.

As the digital era has matured, very wide angle lenses have taken over, made possible by computer aided design and manufacturing. An impossible-to-build lens in 1985 is in everyone’s bag by 2023. I have several that I love, including a very lightweight, very affordable 10-20mm for my Nikon APC-sensor (24x15mm) cameras.

But I am also a lover of the classics, and as larger imaging sensors (36x24mm) have made their way into my workflow, so have a couple of classic ultra-wide-angle lenses: the AF Nikkor 20mm f/2.8, and the AF 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5.

You will usually find one or the other of these classics parked on my Nikon D700, usually as my second camera at events like news conferences and football games. They are very capable. The 18-35mm is more versatile, while the 20mm is more compact, yet has a larger maximum aperture. The 20mm also has the advantage of creating very smart 14-point sunstars with its 1990s-standard seven straight aperture blades.

Oddly, the bigger 18-35mm is noticeably lighter than the 20mm, since it was produced using a plastic barrel, focus, and zoom rings, while the 20mm is all-metal.

The use of these lenses can be a bit tricky, since using a wide angle to “get it all in the frame” usually results in an image that bores the viewer. The best way to use these lenses is in creation of a narrative that leads the viewers into the scene with near-far relationships and leading lines. That means using a wide angle involves movement – up, down, looking up, looking down, crowding in and, honestly, having fun bringing new perspectives to old subjects.

If I had to nail it down, I’d say the 20mm is my very favorite wide angle lens.

As the sole news and sports photographer at my newspaper, a lot of disparate duties come my way. I shoot sports action, spot news, feature photos (to go with my stories), head shots, group photos, ribbon cutting photos, illustrations, and, in the next few weeks, a ton of what we call “media days.”

They can be a grind, since I am called upon to make team photos, head shots, and feature photos of hundreds of kids at the high school and college level.

For a while I was working these assignments with a Tamron 18-250mm “super zoom” lens, an optically mediocre but functionally versatile lens. But, since Tamron lenses aren’t the toughest in the world, this one quit on me, specifically, it quit zooming. The tiny plasticky parts in the zoom mechanism broke and seized up, making it a heavy, un-special 18mm.

That left me in my fallback position, a wide angle on one camera and a telephoto on the other; one for teams and groups, the other for head shots and features. It worked pretty well, but that combination slows down my workflow, and, as many older photographers will tell you, make my neck and shoulders pay by the end of each session.

I looked at some options, but none were really right. I have a couple of 18-55mm lenses sitting around, which I can kind of make work, but the 55mm end of the zoom isn’t quite enough. I have a 2005-era 18-70mm that was sold as a kit lens with the Nikon D70S back then. It’s got a bit more reach, but is optically disappointing, and the zoom ring is rough and uneven, so I really don’t like using it.

A third option was pressing my beloved AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm into service, but part of me wants to hold close to it both because it has been one of my favorite travel lenses, but also because it was quite expensive, and I have no desire to watch it get crunched by a pile of football players.

I thought about it for a while, and decided to look into a used (I know, I love used lenses) zoom in the 16-85mm through maybe 18-140mm range. A bit of shopping on Ebay and I found a good-condition AF-S Nikkor 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G DX at a surprisingly low price, and it arrived today.

I like this lens already, for a couple of huge reasons: it is sharp (so far), it is very lightweight, the zoom ring is huge and smooth, and it fits the “media day” requirements perfectly. And while it lacks the glamour of the D700 with my 20mm f/2.8 on one shoulder, and the D3 with the 70-200mm f/2.8 on the other, I think it might be just the right lens for the job.

I’ll be pressing into service right away.

With what seems like the wettest summer in decades, my garden is giving me a beautiful harvest of tomatoes, peppers and, cucumbers, almost every day. But because of that very wetness, I am losing as much as I am keeping because of rot. There is some kind of white fungus that appears on the lowest fruit on the vines, I guess because it’s so close to the moist soil.

It turns out that this isn’t the first time this month I’ve been visited by fungus.

A very thoughtful friend gave me a camera bag and a cardboard box full of camera gear, including two film cameras, five lenses, and a dozen or more filters. Wow, that’s so fun, and I’m so grateful when my readers and neighbors think of me like that.

As I began to look over this gear, I discovered that all the lenses had a common malady of many older lenses: fungus growth inside the optical elements of the lenses.

Fungus growth inside lenses happens when lenses are stored with neglect. I expect that these lenses were stored in an attic, garage, or shed where rainwater or wet soil is present.

The problem with lens fungus isn’t that it’s present on the surface of a lens element, but that it is usually present on lens elements that you can’t easily reach.

Also, while fungus isn’t “contagious,” if it is alive inside your lens, it will continue to grow. To kill the fungus, just leave your lens in open sunlight for an hour or two, preferably not when it’s too hot outside. The ultraviolet part of the sunlight spectrum (which is also the part that gives you a sunburn) will kill the fungus. It won’t, however, remove the damage.

If you see a teeny amount of fungus damage at the edge of a lens, and you have decided you can’t get to it to clean it, don’t worry too much. If there is a lot of fungus damage, it might be reparable, but weigh the actual value of a lens against the cost of repairing it, which involves a professional repair place, and it won’t be cheap. It’s one thing to repair a $3000 lens, but entirely another to repair a $300 lens.

Periodically, you hear me, or any of an additional million photographers and photo instructors, say that your next lens should probably a 50mm. Why? Whether you are shooting larger sensor cameras like 24x36mm, or smaller sensors like the APS-C or Micro 4/3, the 50mm lens does some amazing things few other lenses can. Why?

• 50mm is about two inches, so lenses around this focal length are, in human terms and scales of economy, easy and cheap to build, and as a result…
• There are millions and millions of them in the world, mostly very affordable or even in your possession already, since this lens was sold with most cameras during the end of the film era, from the 1960s to the early 2000s.
• Many 50mm lenses feature a large maximum aperture compared to kits lenses of today. Even the least expensive of them typically open up to f/1.8, and some older ones are f/1.4. Both are very large when compared to 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lenses.
• That large aperture translates into easier focusing, better low-light performance, and, the biggest one, shallow depth of field.

Because of it’s human-scale build-ability, the 50mm class of lenses also tends to be a satisfyingly sharp lens. But I recently bought a lens in this class, a 58mm, at an estate sale that I found a bit disappointing: the MC Rokkor-PF 58mm f/1.4.

Why? The reason we like these lenses is their ability to shoot at that large aperture. f/1.4 is an almost magical aperture setting for a lot of photography. It can render backgrounds as satisfying washes of color and light, it makes for a good working distance for pictures of people, and some of these lenses create an almost dream-like quality to an image by introducing unique flare, ghosting, or other aberrations that add an almost antique quality to our images.

This 58mm fell short in early efforts to use it.

The big disappointment for this lens is the bokeh. For those who don’t understand this subtle concept (about 90% of all photographers, a topic for another day), bokeh is a word used to describe the quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image. As you can see, bokeh for this lens is cluttered, linear and distracting, or, as I like to say, ratty.

So while I won’t throw this lens in the trash, it’s disappointing performance combines with a slow, heavy, inconvenient build, rendering it a place on display on a shelf, not in my camera bag.

My photographer friend Robert was in town this weekend, and we did the photographer thing, including a photo shoot Robert did for some of his fellow church friends.

Robert and I share a slightly out-of-balance love for lenses. Lenses are beautiful and interesting. Lenses tease our imaginations. We desire lenses, all lenses, even lenses we don’t really think we will use.

Add this to the fact that I currently have a photography student who has designs on owning the entire line of current Fujifilm lenses, and the fact that Robert brought essentially all of his lenses when he visited, and that today I received a delivery of a very cool lens I bought on eBay, and the result is a kind of lens mania.

The lens I bought is one of the oldest Fujifilm lenses, an 18mm f/2.0. I was interested in it for several reasons: it is very small and lightweight, it wasn’t very expensive, it’s a nice wide angle without being ultrawide, and, lastly, because I was very inspired by the work my young friend Mackenzee has been doing with her Fuji X100V, which is equipped with a 23mm f/2.0 lens.

I’ve only had this 18mm for a couple of hours, but it’s appears to be the lens I expected it to be. On my Fuji X-T10, it makes a very small package that is as light as it is inconspicuous. Focus is quick but a bit chattery, and the few frames I put through it look great.

At least one internet review of this lens says it is only for the Fuji X-Pro1 and X-E1, but that is not the case. It appears to work fine on my X-T10.

I expect I’ll make it part of my travel kit, not my news kit, since I tend to be pretty rough when shooting news. But watch this space for many more efforts to come with this combination!

One of the biggest reasons my generation of photographers started with Nikon was their absolutely fantastic lenses. They were well-built, solid, heavy, and made incredible images.

To stay competitive starting in the late 1990s, however, Nikon had to take some serious shortcuts, one of which was the extensive use of plastic in the bodies of many of their lenses.

The AF Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G is one such lens. I originally bought this lens for my wife as part of a “kit,” married to a Nikon D70S and an 18-70mm lens. For years, she shot with these lenses at family reunions or on road trips. Eventually, we replaced her two-lens kit with a single lens, a Tamron 18-250mm, which, while not all that great optically, greatly simplified the logistics of her photography: every lens she needed was at her fingertips with a simple turn of a zoom ring.

I spotted the modest 70-300mm sadly gathering dust on a shelf recently, and put it into my workflow, only to be instantly reminded of its shortcomings.

So why is the 70-300mm, and other lenses like it, weaker than other lenses in this same category? It is missing a single item: extra-low dispersion glass. Nikon calls this “ED” glass, and even though my other 70-300mm had just one small ED glass element, it makes a noticeable difference.

ED glass fixes one of the most vexing problems with telephoto lenses: secondary chromatic aberrations, which are green and magenta color fringes on some edges of some images.

One thing this lens has going for it is it’s weight: it is so light on the camera that you might think it’s not even there.

Despite its flaws, I’m not going to get rid of this lens. If you know what to do, you can make pretty decent images with it. 1. Don’t shoot it at 300mm. Optical quality starts to deteriorate at about 200mm, and 300mm is a wreck. 2. Always stop it down a little. “Stopping down” means using a lens with the aperture set smaller than wide open. Most lenses are sharper stopped down a little, but it makes a big difference with this class of lenses. 3. Be patient with autofocus. Lenses with smallish maximum apertures tend to cause autofocus to hunt and wander, looking for right right spot to be in focus.

If you have a lens like this, shoot with it and decide if it is doing the job for you, or if you should think about replacing it with something larger, heavier and more expensive, but much more capable.

It’s been a completely amazing holiday season for me as a journalist and photographer. Our readers have gotten into the very welcome habit of calling me when they or their groups have a festive event, and I have covered a dozen or more items, from hayrides to sweater contests, and everything else that is photographable about Christmas.

This week a friend of mine asked if I would do the honor of photographing his surprise marriage proposal to his girlfriend under the brightly-lit footbridge near the entrance to Ada’s iconic Wintersmith Park. It sounded like fun, so I agreed. I also invited my good friend and former Ada News intern Mackenzee Crosby to join us, just because we both love being behind the camera.

I mostly shot the event with my AF-S 50mm f/1.4, a wonderful lens that I should make a point to bring out and work with more often. The light in the archway was amazing, and the woman unreluctantly said “yes” to the proposal (whew!), so it was a great, fun opportunity.

At the end of the evening, with the light working so well for us, I asked Mackenzee to pose for a portrait. I made a couple of frames, then reviewed on the monitor, and saw some tell-tale artifacts.

“Wait,” I said, “I’m getting sparkles.”

What I was seeing is a rare but real artifact caused by reflections between the lens and the uv (ultraviolet) filter I keep on the front of all my lenses. It was creating bright butterfly-shaped highlights directly opposite some bright lights in the frame.

I took the filter off, and they instantly disappeared.

Many photographers won’t use a filter on the front of their lenses due to this possibility, arguing that any additional reflective surface in the system can degrade image quality.

Thus the question remains: should your lens be wearing a filter?

A filter on the front of the lens has saved several of my lenses from destruction. Between blowing rain and dust, the occasional camera-drop, colliding with players at sporting events, and, on one occasion, a direct collision with a doorknob, filters have been directly responsible for saving my lenses. It’s a good feeling too: instead of having to send a lens to be repaired, or even replacing it, I fumble through my shoeboxed of filters and find a fresh one to replace the broken or scratched one.

Also, I am often in the field when the front of my lens needs to be cleaned, and usually the only thing I have handy is my shirt tail. Do I want to clean the front element of a $1500 lens with my shirt tale, in the field? I have no problem cleaning an $8 filter with my shirt.

So, yes, a filter is a good idea if you make pictures like I do: every day, in all kinds of harsh conditions. The trick is to keep your eyes open for problems your filter might be giving you, and make good notes about when and how this might happen.

I know it seems shallow, but I like my lenses to look big, heavy, powerful, and intimidating. I hate lenses that look like dog noses or pastry funnels. I like lenses that look like NASA took ten years to design them. I like lenses that seem to be capturing light in a gaping maw of glass.

One such lens that came to me recently from an odd angle is the 1970s-era Sigma – XQ 135mm f/1.8.

I got ahold of this lens recently during a visit from a fellow photographer. He said someone gave it to him free while buying another piece of photo equipment.

The “Scalematic” feature of this lens reads out the field of view at the focus spot, so you can use the lens to measure the size of objects.

It says it is multicoated, but the front element doesn’t have the characteristic blue-green reflection of any of my other multicoated lenses.

Because of the way the t-mount attaches to this lens, there is no mechanical connection to the aperture operating pin, so the lens will only work at its largest aperture, f/1.8. This isn’t really a problem, since we own lenses like this so we can use them wide open.

I shot with it a bit. The contrast is very low, but sharpness is there, though the depth of field at f/1.8 is razor-thin, and it is completely unforgiving of any focus errors.

Many photographers tend to think of large-aperture lenses as “bokeh masters” or “bokeh beasts,” but they often get the fundamentals wrong. “Bokeh” isn’t how far out of focus something is, it’s the characteristics of the out of focus area. Thus, every lens has bokeh, from the humblest kit lens to the newest super-telephoto.

The focus throw, the amount you need to turn the focusing ring, is long. This particular lens has a little bit of grab toward the infinity end of the throw like a lot of lenses this old, since the grease in the mechanism tends to stiffen up over time.

The best thing about this lens is the big, gaping front element combined with its steel and brass construction. It feels like it was made to last.