Introduction
The Nikon 14-24/2.8S lens is a solid choice for landscape astrophotography style photographic work. The more I have used this lens, the more continually impressed I am by it. If you have been reading my blog over the last year, you will know that I favour tracking the night sky in most instances. This lens is very easy to use in such situations to produce high fidelity results edge to edge, The above image in this article is demonstrative of this. I have done no correction to coma, astigmatism or chromatic aberration here. The stars at the edge frame and corner, remain in good shape and are not noticeably affected by these aberrations which are so common in ultra wide lenses. This shot is at 14mm, as I discuss later there are some changes to this behaviour through the zoom range (with 14mm being the best), however it is safe to say, that Nikon did a really good job with this lens on Z mount.
Lens Features
This is probably the lightest 2.8 ultrawide zoom on the market. This is no mean feat when considering how optically proficient this fast aperture ultra wide zoom is. It weighs only 650g, and it is well built to boot, with extensive sealing against dust and moisture. This is very good for climates like Scotland where humidity at night can be intense. It’s size is not unwieldy, being smaller than the previous f mount version. This is a huge boon for hikers and night sky photographers in general. I was intially indifferent to the small LCD information screen built into the barrel of the lens; however I found it, along with the top LCD screens on the Nikon mirrorless cameras, to be invaluable at night. I of course use a headtorch, however this saves me having to turn it on to make small adjustments in the dark. You can even mod it’s brightness and the information it displays, from focus distance, aperture, or focal length information. One of the best features that this lens, and others in the Nikon Z mount ecosystem have, is the ability to remember the focus position from when the camera was turned off. I cannot tell you how good this feature is. I am a strong advocate for shot discipline and have previously written quite a bit about it on this blog. I am no stranger to making sure focus is right as part of this strong discipline. That said, I rarely need to adjust this lens. It’s just right out of the bag - so much so that it feels like witchcraft sometimes. The lens, like many in the Z mount family also has a control ring which can be customised for things like the changing of aperture etc. I turned this off as I was concerned of knocking it a night, however I can see many using this function. The focus ring is a narrow but smooth ring, and is very responsive on the Nikon Z8, such that it feels very close to a manual focus lens. This lens can take filters, important if you also want to double it as a daytime landscape lens which I do. I suggest magnetic 112mm Kase filters with an inlaid adapter. I can stack x2 of these no problem with no vignette between 15-24mm. You can also buy a big holder if you want to go that route for daytime landscape work.
Aurora over the Quiraing, Scotland - 14-24/2.8S
Aperture
Yes, aperture can certainly be considered a 'feature’ of this lens, however it deserves it’s own topic heading. I see too many folks trying to shoot landscape astrophotography with f/4 lenses. These individuals seem to want to experience pain. Photography is light, and I’ll tell you at dark starry landscape locations it is in very short supply. Combine that problem with the issue of balancing burning out star cores to white blobs whilst trying to properly expose the sky background and you already have problems: so why add to them before we even start? If you are half way serious, discount any f/4 ultra wide zoom lenses for this purpose from the get go. Ultra wide angle lenses already have tiny clear aperture sizes - remember that aperture is a ratio.
To capture fantasitc details and colour in the night sky with low noise, we want the fastest lenses we have, and to keep things easier, a wider frame of view to begin with is best until we become proficient in capturing the night sky. I always recommend lenses no slower than an f/2.8 aperture. When shooting with limited light, it should be a given that we want to maximise light collection. There isn’t much light at night, so we can use large aperture lenses in order to help us out in that regard. See my gear page for some of the lenses and cameras that I personally use. In terms of light collection, some of the most efficient lenses are between 24-50mm and with an f/1.4 aperture. This is due to clear aperture size (the amount of light a lens collects is based on it’s aperture and focal length. We have to remember that aperture is a ratio, thus it is affected by the focal length of the lens. A 14mm 2.8 lens does not gather anywhere near the same amount of light as a 50mm 2.8 lens does, so we really do not want to hamper this further by selecting an even slower f/4 lens). To work out a clear aperture size for a lens, we take the focal length and divide it by it’s aperture. Thus:
For a 24mm f/1.4 lens we get:
24 / 1.4 = 17mm diameter of clear aperture
For a 35mm f/1.4 lens we get:
35 / 1.4 = 25mm diameter of clear aperture
Now let’s look at something that everyone jumps onto when shooting the night sky, or aurora. Ultra Wide Angle lenses. Now they can have some advantages, however, with regards to light collection, let’s look at the numbers:
For a 14mm 2.8 lens we get:
14 / 2.8 = 5mm diameter of clear aperture
Since clear aperture is a direct correlation of the light collection abilities of a lens, we can deduce that ultra wide angle lenses are not necessarily the best as everyone thinks they are, despite this I still love using them at night and continue to do so. For further reading on this subject, please see here. It is important to understand that once you get more competent, you may want to explore this on a deeper level.
If we use a 14mm f/4 zoom lens in an astrophotography situation, our light gathering clear aperture is only 3.5mm!
Orion over Duncansby Sea Stacks
Optical Performance
I used to shoot with the 14-24mm 2.8G lens for the F mount. This lens was revolutionary at the time it came out in 2007, and even had people from other systems adapting it to their cameras. As mentioned, this new lens improves the basics like size and weight, and further pushes optical quality. I no longer have the G lens, however the major improvements I notice are generally better aberration control throughout the zoom range and vastly improved vignetting control. Firstly, this lens is sharp throughout the zoom range and across the frame (I generally hate talking about lens sharpness, it is such a bourgeois concept). The strongest points of the zoom lens across the frame are 14mm where it is superb, this is also the case up to about 22mm where it slowly drops off in a very mild way with regards to corner performance. This sharpness drop off is so mild, and it starts off so great that you will simply never notice this in real images, for the most part this is a normal phenomenon optically: that the longest end of the zoom is a little weaker. Despite this, it’s actually 24mm that has the sharpest central region of the whole lens, and lens testing that shows this corner drop off in sharpness, doesn’t seem to affect stars badly at all. In fact, I found that the stars got better again at around 24mm in the deep corners, a touch better than at 20mm. Regarding other major factors, there is significantly less chromatic aberration in the new S lens, so star colour is improved. The shape of the stars remains better into the far corners throughout the zoom range than the old lens. Please bare in mind that these images are not all taken on the same evening, so conditions can and do effect what we see. However, the following will still give you a great idea of what to expect when using this lens for astrophotography. Let’s have a look at where this lens performs at it’s absolute best in terms of most aberrations:
100% Corner Crop - 14mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 60s, Tracked sky
This is a 100% crop from the deepest corner on a 45MP Z8 body at it’s widest focal length of 14mm of the headline shot in this article. This is very good performance from a fast, rectilinear ultra wide lens. Star colour is good, chromatic aberration is under very good control, and star shapes remain very good into the far corners, with almost imperceptable enlargement of their size which is not noticeable in the end shot, even for the discerning viewer, on a large screen or print. Note that some of the glow is due to atmospheric conditions. I also wonder if I was just a slight hair off perfect focus, because in other shots, I’ve seen even better corners (atmospheric conditions too). Another thing to point out here, is that almost every ultra wide angle zoom has some level of field curvature present. This means the plane of focus isn’t perfectly flat. This can reveal itself more at certain points throughout the zoom range. Here, I could have improved this by focusing a bit further out from the centre. Most of the time I advocate focusing 1/3 in from the sides to get balance between central sharpness and corner performance. This doesn’t mean that the centre will turn blurry - no sir, infact it will stay sharp, but the corners will benefit hugely. NB: there was also aurora present during this shot. I’ve shot with a 14mm 1.8 sigma art lens on my DSLRs for years now, and it is crazy how much optics have been able to be improved for astro in the corners. This is in part due to the Z mount no doubt, and of course we are comparing different apertures - however I can tell you even if I put the 14mm 1.8 art to 2.8, the 14-24mm would easily win in this regard. (Of course, I wouldn’t do that, because you shoot a 1.8 lens at 1.8 for these situations and you take the pain of the aberrations). Now let’s move our attention to the centre of the frame and see how the stars look:
100% Centre Crop - 14mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 60s, Tracked sky
A centre crop shows good star colour, chromatic aberration is under very good control, and star shapes are nice and rounded. Now let’s zoom in a little to 17mm:
100% Corner Crop - 17mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Non Tracked sky
Again, this is an aurora shot. At 17mm, in the far corners of a 45MP file, the star performance is still very good, and consider that if I had tracked here, this would be better than I am showing here, and generally is. There is a touch of chromatic aberration on the larger stars at 17mm. Now let’s look at the centre at 17mm:
100% Centre Crop - 17mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Non Tracked sky
The centre is excellent with this lens. I can see nice round stars, good star colour and no CA. Now lets move up to 21mm and view the corners we get at this focal length:
100% Corner Crop - 21mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Tracked sky
This is clearly where there is some minor issue with the star shapes. It’s only found in the deepest corners, where they develop little wings, a slight ‘T’ shape and enlargen a little more than at other focal lengths. It’s still useable, and bear in mind, we are looking at vast crops here. I have said don’t buy an f/4 lens, and for good reason. (f/4 lenses are usually worse than this and stopping down to f/5.6 is a torture test). However, you could stop down to casily improve this issue if it were shot critical. You can do such things with a star tracker, which is why I highly recommend them if you are serious about taking your astro work to the next level. To demonstrate this improvement at f/4 at 20-21mm, let’s look at another 100% crop shot at that aperture on a tracked sky under dark conditions, firstly observing the full scene:
Full Scene, 20mm f/4 ISO 800, 60s, Tracked sky
100% Corner Crop - 20mm f/4 ISO 800, 60s, Tracked sky
As you can see, accessing f4 on this lens at 20-21mm helps to solve this minor issue, giving good optical performance.
100% Centre Crop - 21mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Tracked sky
As expected, no issues here, the lens looks perfect and stars are nicely rounded. NB the brightness difference you are seeing from corner to centre in these crops are due to vignette and aurora. You will not normally see as large a discrepancy as you are seeing here. It just so happens that when testing the lens at different focal lengths there was a major aurora event (May 2024 in the Northern Hemisphere). Finally, let’s examine the end of the zoom range, 24mm:
100% Corner Crop - 24mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Non Tracked sky
The corners improve a bit again here and are perfectly useable. We can also (if using a tracker) shoot at f/4 if required to improve this. Doing so improves the star sharps to a slightly better, circular shape as they appear naturally in the night sky.
100% Centre Crop - 24mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Non Tracked sky
The centre is once again solid at 24mm. Let’s have a brief look at vignetting:
14mm full star field - tracked, vignette at f/2.8, ISO 800, 30s (I could have done 60 here)
24mm full star field - tracked, vignette at f/2.8. ISO 800, 60s
Vignetting is well controlled with this lens. There is nothing here that good shooting technique cannot overcome to produce a picture with a high image quality. You may be wondering about these images being quite dark. Remember, that these are singular shots with zero processing, to show what the lens is doing. You will notice however, that because I have carefully selected low ISOs and exposure times which are long, but not too long, in order to properly reveal stellar colours, that the stars are not burned out white dots? Essentially I have protected the highlights by shooting this way. I will normally stack several of these tracked exposures (three is common) to produce the results shown on this website. Both these shots were carefully exposed, with an intent on stacking the tracked exposures. Many minutes, or high ISO will often burn out the star cores, and we don’t really want that. It is very rare to find me shooting over ISO 1600 for this reason. Distortion is on the whole, well controlled. 14mm does have the expected barrel distortion, as seen from the 14mm star field shot shown, and it’s not bad for a zoom lens. To give a comparison, the 14-30/4 has over double the amount of barrel distortion at 14mm! At around 18-19mm there is basically no distortion present, then up to 24mm, a very low amount of pincushion comes back. A non issue for the most part, and can be corrected with profiles easily if needed. Of course, most of the distortion people are talking about in UWA lenses is perspective based. It reveals itself from the position they are shooting from, and the angle they are holding the lens to the scene at. Our eyes correct for all of this. Vertical and horizontal lines stray straight. When we look up at tall buildings when standing at the base of them, they don’t lean back, or keystone like they do with lenses. (They actually do, but our brains fix it, to spare us the motion sickness).
Castle Menzies, 14-24mm 2.8S
Why Choose the 14-24/2.8S?
I have advocated for a while now of using more than just ultra-wide lenses for the night sky. This is for many reasons - light collection (clear aperture size), framing up tighter on constellations or deep sky objects, increasing capture detail, reducing noise, etc. However, that said, it is very difficult to be an astro-landscape style shooter without having at least one ultra-wide prime or zoom lens for those times where you just want to keep it simple. Astrophotography can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. I sometimes just shoot at 14mm. I track the sky, then I turn the tracker off and expose for the ground. I can then blend them in post processing and I am done. I can also shoot tighter, at 24mm on the lens, following the exact same principl as I did at 14mm. I can also shoot in other ways at the longer end of the zoom range; like frame up the sky with a tiny sliver of foreground. That shot is therefore mostly tracked sky only, then I can turn the tracker off, pan the shot down to the foreground, this time with only a sliver of sky and expose the foreground shot. In post processing I can simply edit and line them up from the reference points in both shots. I can be ultrawide one moment, then I can be at 24mm to line up a low lying constellation, or andromeda etc on the horizon the next, with no lens changes - a boon in the dark.
So I’ve spoken about my rationale for using such a lens, however, why this particular lens? Well, if shooting Z mount it is the only game in town. There is a 14-30/4 lens however for reasons previously mentioned I do not recommend going that route. Adapting the old G lens via the FTZii would be nonsensical. One could buy a 14mm prime lens from one of the junk brands out there, however I personally think when all is said an done this is the one lens that needs to be in the bag. If I am cold and tired, this is the lens I reach for, because it is simplier astrophotography then using a 50mm prime to make a huge mosaic panorama which takes ages to complete. The 14-24mm 2.8S is also just very fun to use. It’s well built and optically sound, and like many who do a mixture of daytime landscape photography and astrophotography - a growing crowd, it makes sense to forego the f/4 lens for this. The versatility of a fast aperture zoom with this level of optical quality is difficult to ignore. The relatively speaking lightweight nature of this lens means if you are hiking into a dark sky location you can keep your bag as light as possible, perhaps foregoing your other normal astro primes you would take with you for those ‘near car’ shots that we all do (especially on cold nights).
As one becomes a more experienced astro shooter, especially after a bit of experience in deep sky, they can really become critical of their own images and others. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The first thing that always jumps out at me is when I see astro landscape pictures with huge, deformed stars at the periphery. It’s probably only something we see, but once you see it, it cannot be unseen and in some lenses it is quite ugly. It would be made even worse if the lens was decentered, or had a tilted element. As you can see from the full size images I have shown here, or even the crops, this lens is very solid in this regard and doesn’t leave these problems in any significant way imprinted on the images.
Always be Critical and Re-evaluate
In this game it is important to constantly evaluate our needs and shooting practices. I write this article for 2024, however it may be in 5, or 10 years something else can help me up my game even more. I think it is likely anything I see will be iterative, rather than revolutionary. Most of the improvements will be with my technique and compositional ability over the gear. I say this because the gear has come on so much in the last 10 years that no one can decry it is getting in the way of anything anymore, like we could have perhaps said at the dawn of the digital camera era. That said, to construct these types of images to a high level, it must be said that the gear is important. I would personally like to see a 14/1.4 lens for Z mount. Sigma have one for their mount and also make it available for Sony e-mount. I’d also be interested in a non junk brand, fast aperture fish eye lens. Why you might ask? These lenses can be very creative at night. The advantage in astro shooting can be significant too; when the lens designer is free from bending starlight from the periphery of the frame through the lens to reach the sensor whilst keeping lines straight, the stars can appear much better at the edge frames and corners in a fish eye design. The Sigma 15mm 1.4 fisheye is a perfect example of this, and it’s star shapes actually beat the rectilinear 14mm 1.4 lens they make, noticeably so. I’m sure that even if a lens like this comes our way on Z mount, I’d be unlikely to sell the venerable 14-24mm 2.8S nikkor, because I use it in landscape situations, but also because it is very versatile at night also. This is coming from someone who shot landscape photography for years with just prime lenses, so I know the challenge of composing well with a fixed lens. My kit for landscape astro shooting remains to be the 14-24/2.8, a 24/1.4, 35/1.4 and a 50/1.4. Oh yes, I also have an old 20/1.8 I still use on dslrs too.
So after reading my take on this lens and viewing the crops, it will be no surprise that the 14-24/2.8S comes Highly Recommended.
14-24mm/2.8S of Aurora Corona, May 2024 from Scotland