Due to the Popularity of this review
I have made a New Site for this Lens
The Lens
The Noct-Nikkor 58mm f/1.2 lens is from the 1970’s era of film photography. It has an AI and AIS version (AIS shown Below). This lens first came out in the late 1970’s with a target market of Night Photographers. It has hand ground lens to allow for points of light at night to appear as points of light in the final picture; rather than oddly shaped blobs.
Field Test-Shots
The f/1.2 aperture facilitated its low light usefullness being the fastest lens Nikon has produced that has a depth of field. As shown in the picture below, this DOF is very narrow however it does allow the picture to be taken hand-held in low light conditions.
Notes of Interest @ f/1.2
Focusing
Focusing can be quite a pain on Nikon’s Digital Single Reflex Lens Cameras (DSLR) as they do not have a good focusing screen that film cameras did. This is because DSLR rely heavily on the autofocus function of the camera which can use the assisting focusing light when extra light is needed; not so when you are trying to manually focus a lens. There are solutions to this focus screen problem, however they require some changes to your camera that I for one, am not willing to make (maybe on the second body when I get one).
Moving Object
These lens focus really smoothly, however if your shooting at f/1.2 its a crap-shot for moving objects. In fact, forget it (unless your focusing at infinity).
Cost and Availability
Ask anyone who knows anything about these lenses and they will tell you two things. One they are hard to come by, Nikon only made a few thousand of these and that was over 26 years ago. They are also really, really, really (three really) expensive for what they do if you do happen to find one on ebay you’ll see that $2000-$3000 is the price range for this lens depending on its condition (sometimes). If you don’t need Noct, and you don’t need f/1.2, then you likely won’t buy this lens.
The Cheaper Nikkor f/1.2 Option
If spending a couple grand on a Noct lens isn’t your thing there is an alternative out there for the f/1.2. Its a 50mm f/1.2 manual focus. I’ve never used this lens but it is a whole lot cheaper. There is also a 55mm f/1.2 Ai lens but I could not find one for sale.
NEW DEDICATED SITE
Due to the Overwhelming number of Google Search Hits I have made a mini-site with information on this lens. You can check it out here.
SV GIRI
Image Guy's Blog
Loading ...
7 comments ↓
From experience, the best bet for shooting for action or candids at f/1.2 is to acquire focus with the viewfinder screen and/or AF assist led, and then ‘rack’ the focus ring forward and/or back, whilst shooting in ‘continuous’ mode.
i.e. like darkness!
This is especially true when shooting in really low light
If you have a newer Nikon body, there is also the live view mode and focus calibration features to enhance your ultra fast prime lens experience. Yeehar!
Lets see your luckiest shots, then…
Benny - The trick I found is the mimic the AF-assist light on the camera with a flash light or using the SB800’s modelling light.
[...] Day 4 of the site has gone well, we have over 100 unique visitors and the First Lens review has been posted here. I’m currently working on the next review and working on expanding the first one with some [...]
[...] f/1.2 can get you amazing Bokeh shots. Personally I use the Noct-Nikkor 58mm f/1.2 for many of my bokeh [...]
[...] it was a tight race between my review on the Noct-Nikkor 58mm f1.2 and Mini-Tripods (Three Part Review). But in the end, it was the Noct-Nikkor review that won out [...]
[...] For this set-up I attached a 75-300mm Nikkor with the 58mm Noct-Nikkor [...]
[...] learn all about the Noct-Nikkor 58mm f/1.2 lens from Nikon. This site will build off my initial review of the lens which turned out to be quite popular. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking [...]
Leave a Comment