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Home >> Photography >> Film Equipment Nikkor 24-120mm f3.5-5.6D AF
The 24-120mm lens has gained a great deal of popularity among wedding photographers according to Popular Photography Magazine contributor Steve Sint. Obviously the ability to go from true wide angle to moderate telephoto allows for a tremendous amount of versatility and ability to cover wide group settings to intimate portraits all within a quick twist of the lens barrel. I could try to BS a bit and claim that I bought it for some wedding candid use for which I do truly use it for but it was also an object of desire from the time I first heard about it. But it hasn't garnered universal praise even among Nikon users. The first year of production had various batches beset with minor problems such as zoom creep and many complained that the level of distortion was too high for serious applications. I read these reports and admittedly they did play a role in stopping me from buying it sooner. But other users also claimed to be quite satisfied with the results and one tester of this lens who I do hold in high regard gave it a thumbs up. David Reuther is self-professed sharpness nut who seems allergic to wide coverage zooms so for him to come out with a favorable report on this lens gave me a strong endorsement for this lens. From my limited tests with the lens I would have to concur with David about where the sweet spot of this lens is. Testing at the telephoto limits of the lens revealed that David's conclusion that the 24-120mm lens performs best at f11 was right on the mark. At 120mm f5.6 I saw softness and a lack of good delineation of details and lines. As I moved along down the f-stops I got better detailing until f11, which again provided the best performance. As you moved on to f16 and then f22 and finally f27, the final f-stop, I could see the gradual deterioration of the fine details until the results at f27 were essentially the same as f5.6. I suppose that we shouldn't be too surprised that f11 would provide the best performance since at the long end of about 85mm onwards, it's f5.6 minimum aperture lens. Two stops down from minimum aperture is f11 and two stops down is usually the accepted rule of thumb for obtaining the best results from a lens.
Zooming out the lens to 120 doubles the length of the lens from its normal 24mm setting and early versions had creeping problems as mentioned before. The designated lens hood is the HB-11 and bloody hell its wide! Too damn big I think but given its wide-angle of view, a necessary evil. Nikon has once again chosen not to make the hood a scalloped design to allow for some protection at the longer focal lengths so it is really only good for 24mm. It seems Nikon only believes in scalloped hoods for their ultra expensive AF-S and future VR zoom lenses. The 24-120mm lens has the same Nikon color and contrast as detected through my testing of the Tamron 20-40mm lens. This consistency is very much appreciated and means I can go back and forth from my more expensive pro-grade zoom lenses to the 24-120mm with no worries about getting good results. Print film reveals a very nice and quite sharp results from it. It has a very similar output to that of the 35-70mm f2.8 lens and I would have no worries about it being able to provide excellent results in candid wedding photography. I often shoot at f5.6 with the 35-70mm lens anyway so the lost of speed would not be much concern especially at the short end and at the long end the reduced depth of field and softness at 120mm f5.6 is still acceptable for portraits. The softness would even be considered a bonus, as most anyone who has shot portraits with super sharp lenses would appreciate.
The Metz 45CL-4 is an older flash and does not allow for easy compensation as the Nikon flashes. The only way I can see being able to adjust the compensation is use the flash's ISO dial. I did adjust the ISO dial for some of the shots to provide less output but it's hard to tell the effects with print film. Further testing with slide film will be forthcoming but as is the Metz and SCA 346 provided excellent looking auto fill flash on the prints (compensated or not) and the 24-120mm lens was as mentioned before on par with my better zoom lenses. Of course casual family snapshots with only 4x6 sized prints to view does not make for serious testing procedures but in the application that I envision most using this lens for, it was excellent. Most of my candid shots for others will rarely see any days at anything larger then 4x6 size prints and that's not because I'm such a bad photographer but just what people really want out of me. My time with the 24-120mm lens is still quite short and perhaps the honeymoon is still going on but I'm quite enthusiastic about this lens. And oh yes, it makes for a wonderful all in one travel lens. No it's not discreet but it's so hard to beat the versatility of such a lens that will certainly better the results of a 28-200mm type of lens. An interesting look at the pitfalls of too much plastic construction found in many autofocus lenses, in this case, the 24-120mm and the consequences of a hard drop. * May 2003 - No longer part of my kit.
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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What
a lens this is. Fat and stubby at the wide end yet longish when
zoomed out to its telephoto limit. There is a disconcerting amount
of plastic used to construct the lens but that hasn't prevented
the lens from being hefty in weight, probably due to the near 5X
zoom range. It's a lens that captured every Nikon user's imagination,
as well a number of non-Nikon users. Does it live up to its billing?
Controversial could be another way to describe this lens and I'm
quite glad that I waited some time before finally succumbing to
its seductive aura.
Another
nitpick with this lens was its speed. Starting at f3.5, which really
means f4 in practical terms, it is most certainly not hare like and
plods along like a tortoise in low light situations. Unless you shoot
off a tripod all the time with this lens or in very bright daytime
conditions, using faster film would be a good bet. I didn't buy this
lens to shoot off of a tripod nor did I buy it for serious applications
in the field. I bought it for convenience and I accept the very real
limitations of the lens for such use. I don't have a problem with
using a film like Kodak E200 when caught in lower light situations
but in real world use the speed hasn't been a huge factor yet. 
Initial
results with Fuji NPS 160 loaded in my F100 and using my new SCA adapter
for my Metz 45CL-4 flash provided me with perhaps the best looking
auto fill flash I've yet seen from prints. I took shots of my son
playing with his cousin in my driveway right around the transition
period from harsh afternoon sun into the magic hour (or hours in summer)
of golden light. Whenever I had used my Nikon SB flashes (SB26, SB27
and SB 28) for 3D Matrix fill-flash the results were always easy to
discern as being flashed and required negative flash compensation
on the Speedlight to provide better results. 
