Nikon Nikkor 105mm f/1.8 AIS

Nikon built this one to plug a hole. By the early 1980s the 105mm f/2.5 was already the portrait lens every Nikon shooter owned, but it was an f/2.5, and the photojournalists working theater, concerts, and dim interiors wanted roughly a stop more glass to play with. So in 1981 Nikon released the 105mm f/1.8 AIS, a short telephoto fast enough to hold a usable shutter speed indoors on slow color film. It stayed in the catalog until 1999, which for a specialist lens that never sold in huge numbers is a long run.

Wide open at f/1.8 it is soft and a little glowy, sharp-ish at the very core if you nail focus and luminous everywhere else. There is some focus shift and that veil of glow that flatters skin and frustrates anyone chasing clinical resolution. The bokeh is where opinions split. Out-of-focus highlights can show outlining and a double-edged structure, and the rendering gets busier and harder wide open than the price tag suggests. That hard-edged background is the lens's known weak spot, not a feature. Stop down to f/2.8 or f/4 and it snaps to genuinely crisp across the frame, with the warm, slightly low-contrast color signature that older Nikkors share. The 62mm filter thread is shared with several pro Nikkors of the period, so filters cross over if you already shoot the system.

It is a portrait and available-light lens first. Head-and-shoulders work at f/1.8 separates the subject from the background in a way the f/2.5 never could, and the longer working distance keeps you off the sitter's face better than an 85mm does. Stage and event shooters reached for it before fast zooms existed. It is not a landscape lens and nobody pretends otherwise. You bought 105mm and f/1.8 for subject isolation, not for resolving distant detail in the corners.

Two real gripes. It is a dense chunk of glass, heavy on the front of a film body and front-heavy in the hand by the end of a shoot. And like any fast lens with a big front element, it can drop contrast when a bright source sits near the frame edge. The optics are multicoated with Nikon Integrated Coating, so flare is reasonably controlled for the speed, but physics still applies. Pull out the built-in telescoping hood and keep the sun out of the corner.

Today it sits in an odd spot. It costs more than the plentiful and excellent 105mm f/2.5, and that extra near-stop of speed is the whole reason to pay up. People cross-shop it against the 85mm f/1.4 AIS, the more famous bokeh lens, but the 105 gives you reach and a flatter, more honest rendering that some portrait shooters prefer. Plenty of buyers skip it for exactly the bokeh reason; the ones who keep it tend to do so for the look at f/2 to f/2.8 rather than wide open.

One metering thought for how you will actually shoot it. The dim-room, wide-open work is where this lens makes its case, and that is also where reflective meters get fooled by a bright stage light against a dark theater surround. Meter the skin or the key light directly in Zone Light Meter and place it on the zone you want rather than trusting an averaged reading. At f/1.8 your depth of field is razor shallow and there is no latitude to spend on a guess.