Photofocus

Copyright Scott Bourne 2009 - All Rights Reserved

I made my first shots with the Nikon 16mm F/2.8 AF-D lens at Yellowstone National Park. I’ve owned several fisheye lenses in the past, including some of the old-fashioned kind that made a circular image.

Hands down, this is one of the best fisheye lenses I’ve ever used.

It’s intended for use on full-frame Nikon cameras like the D3 and D700. It’s very sturdy, small, lightweight and easy to work with and provides a full 180 degree perspective – i.e., watch where you put your feet because they might end up in the shot!

While I didn’t extensively test it, I found the lens to be very sharp across the board with f/5.6 providing spectacular results and F/2.8 sharp everywhere except the extreme corners. After F/8 it starts to get soft too – which is no big deal on a Fisheye lens.

I found no color fringing and frankly amazing fall-off after f/4.

The truly amazing thing about the Nikon 16 fisheye is its ability to shoot minus flare or ghosting. Notice the sun is in the top right corner of my photo and it doesn’t ghost the entire image? No fisheye lens I’ve ever used performs this well.

Nikon includes a small pouch with a warming, cooling and orange filter. These are bayonet mount filters that attach to the back of the lens. There are no threads on the front of the lens that you can use to screw in a filter. The lens ships with a clear filter installed on the back and you need to use that or some other filter to get a shot in focus.

For the money, this lens is a very good value, particularly because of its performance, it’s low weight and its reasonable price to performance ratio. If you’re a full-frame Nikon shooter, this is the fisheye you want.

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