Nikon AF Nikkor 85mm f/1.8D

For about fifteen years this was the lens every Nikon shooter bought the moment they got serious about portraits and could not yet justify the f/1.4. It was the smart-money choice, and it still is on the used market. Sharp wide open, with autofocus and contrast the older manual AI-S 85mm f/2 could not match, light enough to forget in the bag, and cheap enough that you stopped worrying about the front element. The D in the name means it reports focus distance back to the body for 3D matrix metering and flash, which mattered more in 1994 than it does now, but the optics are why people kept it.

Open it to f/1.8 and a head-and-shoulders frame snaps the eyes into focus while the ears already start to go. That short-telephoto compression flatters faces, and the background dissolves into smooth, slightly busy bokeh. It is not the creamiest blur Nikon ever made; the nine-blade diaphragm and the simple six-element formula give you out-of-focus highlights that are not perfectly round rather than melting completely. Stop down to f/2.8 or f/4 and it gets genuinely biting across the frame, the kind of resolution that holds up when you scan 35mm and pixel-peep the lashes. Color is neutral, contrast is high, and it handles backlight better than most fast eighties of its generation, though a strong source just outside the frame will lift the shadows.

The honest weakness is longitudinal chromatic aberration. Shoot a backlit subject wide open and you will find magenta fringing in front of the focal plane and green behind it, most visible on out-of-focus branches, hair, or chrome. The f/1.4D and especially the later f/1.4G clean this up, which is most of what you pay extra for. There is also the focus drive: this is a screwdriver lens with no internal motor, so it will not autofocus on the cheaper bodies (D3000 and D5000 series, and Z bodies via adapter) and it hunts a little in low light even on the ones that do.

It earns its keep on weddings, headshots, theater, and any situation where you want subject isolation without lugging a 70-200. People still cross-shop it against Sigma's 85mm f/1.4 Art (sharper, roughly three times the weight and several times the price) and the Nikon f/1.4G, but the 1.8D wins on value every time and renders close enough that the difference is academic for most film and crop work. On a DX body the field of view sits around 127mm equivalent, which is long but workable for tight portraits.

One practical note for film shooters: this is a fast lens, so you will often be metering and shooting wide open in dim rooms or at dusk, exactly where Zone Light Meter's reflected reading off the subject's face keeps you off the auto-meter's average. The 62mm thread takes a polarizer or a grad cleanly if you want to tame a bright window behind the sitter. Set your placement on the skin, let it fall where it falls, and the lens does the rest.