Introduction

When I shoot people, my objective is to make them look great, hopefully in addition to making an impactful picture overall. With the advent of high resolution camera sensors, we have to be very careful these days otherwise we easily obtain nasty 'digital’ looking images with too much sharpness, and too much post processing going on. I have many influences, however most are not photographer related. Rather, I am personally very influenced by paintings. Iconic work by Gainsborough - ‘The Blue Boy’ stands out for me, the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds and the influence that had to bring to life the fantastic Barry Lyndon. 17th and 18th Century paintings have a great deal of qualities about them that overall make the subject memorable and beautiful, and make me want to emulate them as much as possible. Notice none are particuarly “sharp” feeling. More on this later.

Lenses are obviously a huge part of how we have the camera interpret the scene, after all the obvious givens such a light, subject, decisive moment. I found an affinity that never left me after picking up a mixture of 50mm primes from the Nikon D700 days, ala 2010. I have been shooting with these little lenses for well over a decade now on my DSLRs (yes I still use DSLRs, despite owning Z equipment now). Many will say that optically they have been superseded (and yes, for certain applications, such as astrophotography, I would not specifically buy them for as they have too many aberrations near wide open apertures to be a staple for this genre*). However, for portraiture, and the photography of “things” / “stuff” I find them very satisfying to use. For me, a 50mm is a lens that should be nice and light, and ready to go anywhere. I don’t want to lug one of these huge brick like 50/1.2 lenses about. Nikon’s 50mm f/1.2S lens is frankly ridiculous for a 50mm, and it’s length mostly exists to protect the lens from focus breathing (this only affects video shooters). I am not going to tell you that these little prime lenses are optically the utter 'la crème de la crème, in terms of numbers and specifications, or lens MTF resolution. They won’t pass your graphs and spreadsheets game, however they are able to produce beautiful images with a bit of practice, they are small, light and relatively speaking inexpensive options that really can create and impact an individual look to your pictures, if that is your thing…

When shooting portraiture, generally I do not prioritise ultra sharp lenses. I find most, modern primes to be sufficiently sharp for this task, so this really is a lower priority on my list. I need to reiterate this basic point whilst we are talking about image sharpness, for me, even babies with perfect skin look better with a slightly softer lens that produces some level of spherical aberration at it’s widest apertures, essentially, to be shot with a lens that is tuned to being used for portraits. Spherical aberration is a biggie when it comes to portrait-tuned lenses; over correcting it in a lens design tends to adversely affect bokeh and the focal plane transition. This aberration goes away as we stop down, so lenses that have high correction tend to be very sharp from their widest aperture, and conversely lenses that are a bit softer and have a glow wide open generally are under corrected. With the 50mm lenses that I own: I use them on both full and crop framed sensor cameras, giving either 50mm or 85mm equivalent views respectively.

The 50mm f/1.4G - Good for low light, and keeps bokeh balls round even stopped down. This was shot at f/1.4.

It is important to consider, that your shooting likes and wants may not align with mine or the next photographer. I will admit to using a very mixed bag when it comes to lenses across different genres, and I have that luxury in order to do so as I have been shooting for some time. At night, for my astro work, I would be using a completely different lens, compared to during the day shooting like I am in this blog post. This also might go for landscape too, however I have successfully used all of these 50’s for landscape shooting also, because stopped down they mostly match modern lenses anyway. You might also prefer a very sharp portrait lens. There are situations where I have reached for my 35/1.4 Sigma Art lens because I wanted a bit more sharpness on my subject at the focal plane, and was less bothered about the resulting bokeh. I will not say the bokeh of the sigma is bad either, again it is different and altogether a subjective quality. I have shot plenty of what I feel are good pictures with the 35 1.4 art lens. If you are someone that isn’t particuarly flush I do not recommend you choose and own x4 50mm lenses for each situation or shooting scenario. You should obviously choose one that you think will work for you most of the time. I hope this guide reveals something about that process and helps inform.

50mm is not always thought of a portrait focal length, however there is a lot one can do with a 50mm lens such as these, and it of course depends on your subject’s overall size. 85mm prime lenses are more thought of as classic portrait lenses, as the longer focal length keeps us further from the subject, and thus reduces perspective distortion. That said, 50mm lenses spend more time on my camera bodies than any other prime lens, and they are absolutely viable for portraiture. Some great portraits, particularly environmental portraits (as I am showing in most of this article) have been taken with 50mm lenses. I think it is important to know the rules, then be able to break them when needed. (I reiterate, a portrait can be taken with any focal length). I like to have options (I’ll explain why soon), which is why I have three 50mm primes as it is my favourite focal length. Combined with my 24-70/2.8S, I have x4 50mm focal lengths to shoot with. Crazy? Perhaps, however when you begin to see what I show in some of this article, it opens your eyes. I currently have the 50mm 1.4G and the 50mm 1.8D along with the 50mm f/1.4D primes for f mount. I sometimes shoot these via the FTZII adapter to be able to use them on my Z8 Camera. Sadly these are manual focus only, as Nikon is lazy and made the bare basic adapter they could. See my discussion on why Nikon needs to make an FTZIII with full autofocus support for all screw driven lenses here. All three of these lenses play differently, and have various strengths and weaknesses. All of the Nikon 50mm lenses vignette quite a lot wide open, however this is a characteristic for this type of photography that I like to stamp on my images, with the caveat that it is totally adjustable later on anyway. The 1.4G has smoother bokeh, and is tuned slightly more to the gaussian blur end of the spectrum in terms of the backgrounds it can produce especially when at close range, alas:

Note that, with this lens, it can produce quite a smooth background bokeh in the right circumstances. For low light portraiture, I feel it works better than the 50mm 1.4D and 1.8D, and I very much like what it does in terms of focal plane transitions, here is a good example showing some good bokeh and beautiful focal plane transitions:

Now let me show you the much older 50mm 1.8D prime, which produces a much rougher background bokeh most of the time, but has absolutely zero distortion and produces, in the right circumstances, a great 3D effect. This can occur quite convincingly to the eye, if all the scene elements line up accordingly, the basics - like light, camera to subject distance, subject to background distance, the scene geometry etc. This is a topic I might explore in greater detail in time.

Notice the less smooth, (rougher) background blur here. I am closer, different light, different day, different aperture, different lens. however despite all that I can tell you from years of shooting with these lenses that this 1.8D just draws differently. I like this look. During the day, I really like using the 1.8D lens, because it imprints something unique onto the picture. In fact, as you probably guessed, this is what this blog post is about - all three of these lenses draw very differently and it all depends what you want from your picture. Here is the smoother 1.4G again:

But what about the f/1.4D you ask? This lens is similar to the 1.4G, but it has a softer look wide open, with much less contrast which adds to this. Again, not a bad thing - these things must align with your shooting style and objectives for your picture. The 1.4G improved upon wide open sharpness and contrast in it’s design, and definitely has less chromatic aberration. It also benefits from some coating magic, that the older 1.4D does not have. This means that there is a distinct glow and loss of contrast when using it wide open due to it having bags of spherical aberration. This really gives the ‘Barry Lyndon’ look when shot indoors, especially around candle light. However, as I said it is not necessarily bad news if your shooting wants align with mine, and as said, can produce quite a painterly image, notice the glow effect to the subject’s face because I have used it wide open at f/1.4:

The 50mm f/1.4D is the clear leader out of these 50mm lenses in terms of focus speed. It is blisteringly fast, another huge plus point to owning one. There are of course, other differences. Both of the older D designs are a little more blue shifted in their final outputs. The 1.4G lens is a hint shifted towards a yellower output in the resulting RAW. The D lenses both have much sharper, more defined and ultimately pleasing sunstars. So if you want to use the lens at night stopped down on city lights, or during the day at times such as sunset to make beautiful diffraction spikes off light sources, these do much better, the G is simply no use in that regard, and compared to most modern Nikon F or Z lenses, these are by far the most pleasing that I have seen. I really dislike shooting night scenes like these or sunsets where the sunstar is poor and mushy. It really takes away from the bite you can get when they look supreme, like they do here:

50mm 1.4D Sunstars are excellent — 50mm f/1.8D Sunstars. This was only shot at f/5.6! I don’t need to be at f/16 to obtain this effect. Modern Z lenses are terrible for this, even stopped down they are not great. Note the 1.4D is very similar to this picture. *The 1.4G isn’t great for this.*

The older D lenses, definitely have more out of control aberrations going on wide open, most which improve on stopping down. In a very real sense, with the 1.4D you get a dual personality lens, as long as you like the wide open look, stopping down quickly takes out the glow, and brings in super levels of sharpness right up until f/8. I rarely use this aperture, unless doing school studio style portraits though. Generally the biggest difference I see is, the 1.4G is slightly sharper wide open, and more contrasty than the 1.4D, however it is still what most would call ‘soft’ compared to modern primes. Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve been creating with these lenses for years and I can tell you people like how they look in the pictures, and I don’t have to spend days prepping them with blur filters etc, or spending huge amounts of time with techniques such as frequency seperation on skin. People want to look like movie stars, they don’t want to see all the lines on their face, especially as they get older.

The flattest, least distorting of the three primes is the 50mm 1.8D which has basically zero, which has it’s applications on it’s own. I find the 1.8D is sharp very close to maximum aperture and I use it during the day a great deal, even wide open as I love the look it produces.

Both the D lenses produce a more pronounced flare pattern. Sometimes it can be a red / yellow defined area, sometimes a ring around the image (I actually oddly like it sometimes) but we really have to expose the front element to serious levels of off axis sunlight to get this:

This image was taken without the lens hood (which does not come with the lens). This flare would have potentially been avoided with the hood.

The 1.4G lens flares less than both D lenses, but it can still occur with this lens too. None of this bothers me too much - I often like a bit of flare in my images, depending on the scene and subject. In the above image, it would involve some complex photoshop work to remove. Flare can also occur when more stopped down, and produces the ‘film-like’ lens element pattern flare we see when the sun is in the frame, or another hard light source. This I always like to leave in, as it gives a very organic look to the resulting picture.

Here is the 1.4D lens shot at sunset on a D810 body (shot taken 24th December 2024). This is about as ‘weak’ shot discipline as I’ll use. What do I mean by this? See here. For this particular shot, I pushed things. I dropped down to ISO 64, knowing that this winter sunset scene was a little light starved in terms of quantity of available light to stop motion. This left me with a good metered exposure of 1/50, ISO 64 and f/1.4. It had to be f/1.4 here to maintain this. I waited until he was still, used good hand holding technique - and got a ‘pixel level’ sharp shot. Why am I doing this? Well, ISO 64 is a little bit of a Nikon miracle. It is the reason I have been able to make this shot feel like you are right there, from every piece of highlight, right down to the shadows. I used the 50mm f/1.4D because it is my favourite daylight 50mm. Not hard to see why, it has bags of microcontrast and creates an image more akin to a painting, than something that came off a digital sensor:

Next up is a picture with the 50mm 1.4D at night. This is an entirely different kettle of fish when we are speaking about low light. In these situations, this lens produces a softer, more painterly feel to the final result than the 1.4G or 1.8D would, however there are some issues in the bokeh that now show up that aren’t as evident during daylight hours. You can see that the bokeh in the background is rougher than the 1.4G lens in these situations, and does suffer from ‘outlining’ in the bokeh:

You can also note, as with all Nikon f/1.4 primes, there is off axis mechanical vignetting. Notice the bokeh balls centrally are quite rounded, however as we move off axis, they become pinched. This is simply the restrictions of the mount in designing fast lenses. You will find on Z mount, that the edges don’t do this in the same way. It’s one of the reasons Nikon designed the Z mount with a greater diameter and smaller throat: for lens design.

A 50mm lens is also great for ‘close up’ shots which aren’t macro. We can get quite tight onto subjects and really compose the heck out of the scene to make an impact:

Nikon D200 with 50mm f/1.4D. (acts as 85mm FOV). More like a painting than a picture during daylight.

Below is the 1.4D with a stopped down aperture on a bright spring day. Notice the backgrounds I am showing with the 1.4D compared to the newer G. The G is smoother, but I still like the effect of the older D lens. Sometimes I feel this rougher background helps to trick a type of 3D pop effect to the resulting image:

Here is another using the 50mm f/1.4D prime lens, now in a wedding scenario. Notice that the background bokeh is definitely a little more rough. Some may not like this: we are tuned to prefer gaussian blur type bokeh in the photography community. However, I think it is very characterful, and helps produce, when other supporting elements are within the frame, a 3D effect to the resulting picture:

Here is the slightly smoother 1.4G. I have tried to show a similar subject to background / lighting situation here. You can see that the 1.4G has smoother backgrounds, generally speaking. It does have a nice focus transition too. Closer up, the 1.4G has smoother, more modern style bokeh.

As previously mentioned, all of the nikon 50’s (and mostly all fast lenses on the old mounts), produce a bit of cats eye bokeh, especially with close up subjects to varying degrees. This is due to mechanical vignetting at the mount diameter. I quite like the overall look most of the 1.4G lens for pictures such as these:

Nikon D810, 50mm 1.8D @ f/1.8. It’s crazy bokeh really gives a punch during daylight.

Which Lens?

There are some obvious differentiators here. The first difference can be price and size. If money matters, the 50mm 1.8D can be had for a song. Easily the cheapest. It is quite well built considering, and even has a metal mount and a sort of in built lens hood that works well. This lens is the smallest Nikon 50mm prime lens available, and it can easily fit in the pocket or even jeans. Few lenses can do this! The 1.8D lens has no manual focus override switch, so in order to do this you have to switch it on the body. This isn’t really a big deal and I never really use this function on DSLRs which focus the lens easily anyway, both fast and accurately. The 50mm 1.8D is very sharp stopped down just slightly. It has the least distortion and by f/2.2-2.8 it is very contrasty. Even wide open I find it so pleasing, even in hard light during the day. It has a strong 3D effect to the files when everything measures up in the scene, including the light. Stopping down causes stop sign bokeh because the lens has 7 aperture blades, so the diaphram is not as rounded, however this gives as I have shown, much nicer and more prounonced sunstars. Like the 1.4D there is zero weather sealing. A great, lightweight day shooting lens. All three lenses produce chromatic aberrations in differing amounts, the G lens being slightly better. This encompases both longitudinal (spherochromatism - purple / green infront and behind the focal plane in an image), and lateral CA, which appears on things like tree branches against bright backgrounds. I’ve not laboured on showing these examples much in this article because they are so simple to correct if they show up in post processing. The 1.8D is small and uses a 52mm filter thread which does not rotate, taking filters easily if required.

The 50mm 1.4D is more expensive still. Not always a great choice at night, as it produces smearing over light sources and has the most chromatic aberration of the three, but of course it can be stopped down slightly to massively improve this. During the day, it produces nice painterly pictures, but has very low contrast effect wide open (again, this effect is easily cleaned up by f/2). This lens has by far the most chromatic aberration of the three. In certain circumstance it can be a little tougher to correct because it can cause slightly thicker than normal purple transitions at backlit focal planes on the subject in certain situations. It has a good 3D look to the files. Stopping down causes stop sign bokeh because the lens has 7 aperture blades, so the diaphram is not as rounded, however this gives as I have shown, much nicer and more prounonced sunstars. Like the 1.8D there is zero weather sealing. I like it’s overall look despite these optical flaws / characteristics. Like the 1.8D, the 1.4D lens has no manual focus override switch, so in order to do this you have to switch it on the body. This isn’t really a big deal and I never really use this function on DSLRs which focus the lens easily anyway, both fast and accurately. The 1.4D is a small lens (the in between of the three) and takes 52mm filters which do not rotate, the same as the 1.8D.

50mm 1.4G Bokeh is smooth and more gausian blur type. It suits scenes such as these.

The 50mm 1.4G is the sharpest wide open, and the most contrasty, however it is important to reconcile that it is no where near the levels of sharpness obtained by even more recent lens designs. It’s bokeh is smoother than both of the others, and when stopping down, the bokeh balls stay rounded, and it probably has the best focus transitions of the three. It has a good 3D look to the files in my opinion. It is the most expensive. It has a rubber gasket, which I feel more confident using it in inclement weather. I have owned it for 14 years and never had an issue in this regard. The 50mm 1.4G has the least outlining on bokeh behind subjects out of all of these lenses. I recommend the 50mm 1.4G for low light, especially if shooting stopped down slightly, because the bokeh stays rounded due to it’s 9 bladed aperture. A huge boon for this lens, is that if you own a body without a built in focus motor, it will still autofocus. The 1.8D lenses above, require a body that plugs into the lens and controls autofocus. You can check if your camera has this ability, otherwise you will be using manual focus with the 1.4D and 1.8D lenses. Note that that 1.4G is slower to autofocus than the D lenses. (Nikon try to lie about this and state things like ‘faster, more precise autofocus with the G lenses’), however the facts speak for themselves. Owning all of these lenses, easily reveals to me that the 50mm 1.4D focuses the fastest out of all of them, and by quite a margin. All of the D lenses without focus motors are noiser than their more silent G counterparts when shooting, but all of them focus faster than any 50mm G lens. The 1.4G lens is the largest of the three lenses by quite a noticable amount, and unlike the other two lenses, it comes with a lens hood. It uses an odd 58mm filter thread which does not rotate.

Whichever you choose, (or if you decide to add multiple 50’s) I stress that these lenses are great for people and stuff / things. They are quite characterful, not perfect optically, however can produce beautiful, painterly results. The most important thing I consider is the overall render of a lens of this type. Do I like the type of picture it provides? Your milage is going to vary on this, and you may find that neither three are right for you. This said, I wanted to touch on some of the differences between them here. This is clearly not a scientific test, but my thoughts of what I have seen with using these three over many years. I did not include the 50mm 1.8G Nikkor that came out after the 1.4G, because I have never shot with it. From what I have seen from reviewing hundreds of images, it is ever so slightly sharper wide open than all of the others, however IMO has the worst bokeh. This, of course is subjective. Because it has quite a lot of distortion, the worst bokeh, and it is a 1.8, it doesn’t fit for me, and I am happy with the three that I own and use in this article.

Nikon Z 8, 50mm 1.4G @ f/3.5 on a star tracker mount, March 2024

*For Astrophotography work (as shown above, a single tracked frame from a huge mosaic image - see my astro landscape gallery), although I wouldn’t tell anyone to go and buy these lenses specifically, especially for wide open work (they are not well corrected for the task), the irony is I regularly use the 50mm 1.4G at 2.8-3.5 on a star tracker, with acceptable results. I am considering what to buy in the future to allow me to shoot around f/1.8-2.5, at night. It is important to note, that all three of these Nikon 50’s have severe astigmatism if shot wide open at night. This will make the stars in the corners look like little seagulls, rather than points of light. This affect takes a few stops to dissipate, which is why you don’t see it on the above image, shot at f/3.5.

Final Thought

Remember that owning one of these AF-D lenses which does not have a focus motor built-in, means their longevity is going to greatly surpass any G lens that has an onboard autofocus motor. Moving parts eventually wear out. The more complex the design, the more likely this happens quicker. Lenses such as the 50mm 1.4D and other classics such as the 85mm f/1.4D, will long surpass their G level counterparts. While it might seem like an antiquated technology to have the camera body physically plug into a little socket on the lens to turn the helicoid, in order to move the lens elements to focus the image; it just works. I also ask you this, does it really matter how a lens focuses to you? Generally speaking, I do not see them to be any less accurate than the G lenses in terms of focus precision, another flat out lie that Nikon marketing tell us about the new G lenses. Also, further to this as mentioned earlier in this article, most of the G lenses are actually slower to focus than the D versions. As you can probably tell; I’ve written this article as a photographer who likes to obtain a certain look from lenses. Make sure your views align with mine before taking my advice and spending the money.

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Let’s leave this with a couple of drinks, because I seem to have a shot a lot of them with this lens…

Steve

Blog

Nikon 50mm 1.4G, 50mm 1.4D and 50mm 1.8D Primes

Introduction

Which Lens?

Final Thought