December moods (and first impressions Nikon Plena 135)

The last few weeks have really been rainy - apart from the brief onset of winter at higher altitudes, winter in western Germany is still very limited. Here and there in the first half of December there was an hour when the sun came through and so at least a handful of pictures were taken. In December, you can also still spot some late autumn colours or flowering plants, which are also the focus of my series.

Today I would also like to tell you about a new lens. As always: if you don't need the technology, just scroll to the picture series 😀

I already mentioned here in the summer that I now own the versatile Z 24-120/4 and in the process I swapped my Z 70-200 /2.8 for a Plena 135. I hardly ever need the focal length ranges of approx. 200-350mm, but every now and then a very powerful lens with extreme depth of field would be good.

I heard and read a lot about the Canon RF 135 this year and was totally interested - in autumn the time had finally come and Nikon announced the "Plena".

So what were my first impressions?

Once again, first of all: I don't have any test charts for this lens either - I'm not going to start counting lines. Yes, the lens is "surprisingly" very sharp, what a wonder 😅 Let's take a look at the more interesting topics for nature photographers. Sorted by relevance.

The bokeh: For me, the decisive point in this purchase. I want to split this up:
- The blur circles are really very round, even at the edge of the full frame (FX), so this was not just a marketing promise. The cateye effect is clearly reduced. Depending on the distance and shooting conditions, they are not perfectly round at the edge (FX), but they are significantly better than with any other lens I have come across, especially with a Z 70-200/2.8 at 135mm
- The bokeh in the background is drawn incredibly beautifully, see also the sample images. Not every fast lens with beautiful out-of-focus circles automatically has beautiful bokeh; this one certainly does
Performance at the minimal focus distance: I had rather feared this point as a potential weak point before buying, as the close-up limit was noticeably higher than that of the Canon equivalent. Of course, it's not a macro and I didn't expect to be able to photograph liverworts with it - but many small subjects are, e.g. bluebells, orchids, gladioli, lady's slipper, chequerboard flowers etc...so I would have preferred a close-focus limit of 70cm. But to my delight I can say two things:
- I find the magnification surprisingly large - it was different with my 70-200 at the close-up limit of 135. The typical shortening of the effective focal length hardly seems to have any effect here. I was even able to capture individual leaves or short grasses at a sufficient reproduction scale on the full format (FX), see for example image 12 from the series. The conclusion for me was: the ABM is easily sufficient for all the plants mentioned above...
- The lens delivers fully directly at 82cm - the sharpness performance of lenses sometimes drops off significantly at the closest focusing distance; not here, the images are wonderful directly at 82cm
Aperture: ok, you don't need a review for this. But a note from practice: I don't normally shoot with an aperture starting at 1 and even in low/soft light you can achieve short exposure times so quickly that you can usually do without a tripod. It's quite fun - all the shots below were also taken freehand
Image stabiliser: unfortunately not available - I think that's a pity! Canon has even managed to install one with roughly the same weight. But perhaps this was not possible due to the special optical design (keyword: cateye reduction) or it would have been even heavier or larger otherwise and in this case I prefer the present dimensions to an image stabiliser but more cateye
Autofocus: the autofocus has been very precise in all situations so far. When photographing animals (squirrels), I imagined that the autofocus could not keep up with the speed of my telephoto lenses (400/4.5 and 600/4.0) if I aimed at a subject well outside the pre-focussed area. However, the precision was very good, even when travelling. I won't be using it for action shots either, so it's largely irrelevant for me
Vignetting & distortion: Both extremely low! I don't own a lens that has as little vignetting as this one. Post-processing not really necessary