Nikon AF Nikkor 24mm f/2.8D

This lens focuses to 0.3 meters, and that close-focus trick is the thing people remember about it. Get the front element right up against a foreground object, stop down to f/8, and you can hold a flower and a mountain range in the same frame. Nikon called the floating-element design Close Range Correction, and on the 24mm it actually earns the name. Most wides go soft and field-curvy up close. This one stays honest from infinity down to a foot away.

Wide open at f/2.8 the corners are soft and there is visible field curvature, the kind where the center snaps in but the edges want a slightly different focus plane. By f/5.6 it cleans up, and at f/8 to f/11 it is sharp edge to edge in the way you want a landscape wide to be. Contrast is moderate, a touch lower than the modern coated stuff, which on film reads as gentle rather than flat. Color is classic Nikon neutral, leaning slightly cool. Nobody buys a 24mm f/2.8 for blur, and the seven straight blades make that plain: defocused background highlights stop down into seven-sided shapes quickly, well short of a circle.

The build is the old plastic-barrel AF-D era. Light, compact, a metal mount, and an aperture ring so it works on everything back to manual-focus bodies that read the ring. Autofocus runs off the in-body screwdriver, which means it hunts and rattles and does not work at all on the entry-level Nikon DSLRs that dropped the focus motor. That is the honest limitation. On an F100 or an FM3A it is irrelevant; on a D3500 it is a manual-focus lens.

Flare is the other watch-out. Shoot it into a low sun or a bright streetlight and the older coatings throw a veiling haze and the occasional ghost. A hood helps, but this is a lens that rewards keeping the light over your shoulder. Documentary and street shooters lived with it because 24mm on full frame is the reportage wide, loose enough to show a room without the cartoon distortion of a 20mm, and the small barrel does not intimidate people the way a big zoom does.

Today it trades cheap, often under two hundred dollars used, and the people cross-shopping it look at the older AF 24mm f/2.8 non-D or the much pricier 24mm f/1.4G. The f/1.4 is a different optical class and a different budget. This one is the workhorse you carry when you do not want to think about it. The 52mm filter thread is the quiet bonus: it shares glass with half the classic Nikkor primes, so one set of ND and polarizing filters covers your whole bag. If you are stacking a strong ND for a long daytime exposure, set the filter factor in Zone Light Meter once and let it carry the correction so your metered reading already accounts for the stops you are losing.