The Garden of the Gods is one of the most amazing places in Colorado. The contrast of the red rocks on the blue sky with a snow-capped Pikes Peak in the background makes for quite a lovely scene. This very high quality and large panoramic would look great on your wall!

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Introduction:

I've longed to obtain a good portrait lens for awhile now, and after months of research and testing, I settled on the Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 AF-D. The Nikkor 85mm f1.4 AF-D lens has long been regarded as one of Nikon's best lenses for many reasons. The lens produces incredibly creamy bokeh (the aesthetic quality of the blur in out-of-focus objects in a photograph) and separates the subject with extreme clarity and definition. This is partially because the lens sports a rounded diaphragm with 9 blades. This lens is an absolute champion for portraiture and creative photography as well as landscape photography. This lens offers an incredibly fast 1.4 aperture, which provides great low light capability. It is sharp at every aperture, except, perhaps in the corners at f/1.4.

Technical Specifications:

The technical details of this lens are impressive - extremely fast maximum f/1.4 aperture with stops at every aperture (smallest aperture is f/16); 77mm filter size (great news since most professional lenses take this filter size); a minimum focal distance of 2.8 feet (.85 meters). For an FX body, the horizontal angle of view is 24°, for a DX body, 16°. While this is an autofocus lens, it is not an AF-S lens, meaning that it won't autofocus on the low-end DSLR bodies. Nikon lenses with integrated autofocus-motor are designated AF-S (this lens is AF-D). They are needed for new cameras with lack of an autofocus motor. Today these are the Nikon D40, D40X, D60, D3000, D3100, D5000, D5100 and the Nikon 1 series with FT1 adapter. Fortunately for me, the autofocus works wonderfully on the Nikon D7000, which is arguably the best non-FX camera body made by any camera company. For those of you with one of the above Nikon bodies, do not fret - Nikon has recently updated this lens, enhancing the autofocus by adding a silent wave motor, and modernized the look and feel. The newer version is titled, “85mm f/1.4G AF-S”. Unfortunately, that lens costs nearly twice as much.

Build and Feel:

The build of this lens is quite impressive as well. You may notice that newer Nikon lenses feel plastic-like and cheap. Not this lens, which entered the market in 1995 and had its final production run in 2010. The lens is very solid and feels great.

My Experience on a DX Camera Body:

Many reviews suggest that DX users should not bother with this lens due to the crop-factor of an FX sensor. While I won't disagree that it seems to be a good idea to go with the 50mm f/1.4 lens instead, I opted for the 85mm f/1.4 because I had used it before and because it is often regarded as one of the best lenses you can purchase. I also want to think about the future of my photography; therefore, lenses are an investment. You could spend $500 on glass that you won't be able to use on your next camera body, or you can invest $1000 on glass that you can. The choice is yours. Personally, I find the lens to be a perfect fit for my Nikon D7000, albeit, a tad long. Certainly, the lens has forced me to re-think the way I shoot, and that is enough for me (also - good luck getting similar bokeh results on a 50mm f/1.4).

Performance:

This lens performs wonderfully at almost every f-stop. Even at f 1.4 images are crisp and sharp, with minor loss in sharpness in the corners. By f2.8, images are perfectly sharp, even at the corners. In fact, this lens peforms even better than the newer G lens in this regard. I've uploaded a few sample shots I've taken with the lens, so you too can see the results:

Depth of Field:

The depth of field results from this lens are pretty remarkable. In order to understand depth of field, one needs to understand how f-stops and aperture work. It is somewhat counter-intuitive, so let me explain:

Aperture is expressed as f-stop, e.g. f2.8 or f/2.8.

• The lower the number (f-stop), the bigger the opening of the lens (aperture)
• The higher the number, the smaller the opening of the lens
• Larger opening = more light = shallower depth of field
• Smaller opening = less light = larger depth of field
• Less light = need for a longer exposure (shutter speed)
• More light = need for a smaller exposure

To demonstrate the Nikkor 85mm f1.4 AF-D's capabilities at various f-stops, and to better demonstrate and explain depth of field, I took sample images using a tripod at every f-stop. My camera was set in aperture-priority mode, meaning, I chose the aperture (opening) and the camera adjusted the shutter speed to get the same exposure for each photo. I set-up two demonstrations, the first with a colored pencil as the focal point, and the second as the lens box as the focal point. Please feel free to click on each image inside the box sample to see a larger version of the shot.

Here is the sample set with the yellow colored pencil as the object in focus:

And here is the sample set with the box in focus:

As you can see, this lens performs quite well at all f-stops. I also hope that this demonstration was useful for anyone looking to purchase the lens or understand how f-stops and aperture translates into various depths of field. 

Conclusion:

This is an absolutely dreamy lens that produces amazing results for portrait photography. This lens produces incredble bokeh and offers wonderful control for focus in both manual and auto-focus modes given the proper body pairing. The lens is quickly becoming one of my go-to lenses for most day-to-day applications. My only concern with this lens on an DX body would be focal distance. Indeed, I am hopeful that sometime within the next few years I will be able to purchase an FX body to take full advantage of this incredible lens. 

If you are in the market for a new copy of this lens or any other photography equipment, please consider supporting this site by using this link to the lens on Adorama. Thanks for reading!

This Spring has been quite dry and I've been feeling the itch to get out and get up a summit. I mulled the idea of heading up to do Lackawanna (a high 13er near Independence Pass); however, I knew my time was limited and that I would need to stay closer to home. So, I put out a feeler to my climbing partner Ethan Beute to see if he would be interested in doing something easy close to home. We both settled on Cameron Cone, the easily recognized point often seen in front of Pikes Peak in many photos of Pikes from Colorado Springs. I'd had my radar on Cameron Cone forever it had seemed, so it was a great choice in that regard. At the last minute, I also invited one of my other hiking partners, Sarah Musick, and plans were in motion to meet at Ethan's at 5 AM and hit the Cone. Since both Ethan and I are avid photographers, we opted for the early start in the hopes of getting some decent shots of sunrise from the trail somewhere.

Cameron Cone is named after a famous soldier and newspaper publisher, Robert Alexander Cameron. When originally dedicated, the summit was called Cameron's Cone. The Cone towers 10,707 feet above the city of Colorado Springs and is the fourth highest ranked summit in El Paso County and 1,935th highest in the State of Colorado. For a whole listing of summits in El Paso County, check out this link. 

There are several routes to reach the summit of Cameron Cone; however, we chose one of the more rigorous routes to gain the summit. Instead of driving to Crystal Park, as some would suggest, we opted for the long route from Barr Trail. Here is a map of our route, feel free to click on it to see a slightly larger version. All in all the hike was 7.0 miles and 4,175 ft. of elevation gain - a nice work out for sure!

We decided to park on Ruxton Ave. in Manitou Springs and walk the road to where it ends. We then chose to cut left just after the chain link fence to the left of the Barr Trail and then walk the Cog Railway about a hundred feet. From there, we went straight up the hillside to the south until we reached the Englemann Trail. We found this guide to be very useful for the trip, as you can see from this photo of Ethan and I taken by Sarah.

We found the route to be fairly straight-forward once on the trail; however, we did lose the trail in one spot lower in the Englemann canyon. A simple up-climb and we were able to re-locate the trail. I would mention that I did bring my GPS with me and I had entered the coordinates from the Summitpost route description into my GPS as waypoints which proved useful.

Before we knew it, the sun had begun to rise and we found a suitable place to stop. I set-up my new Gitzo carbon-fiber tripod and took a ton of shots with my Tokina 11-16 lens. I love this tripod! It was somewhat heavy, but well worth the haul. I was not terribly impressed with my sunrise photos, mostly because I think we were too low and some of the view was obscured by Eagle Mountain to the south and east. Nonetheless, here's a few of my shots. 

The city lights made for a very cool view.

I also had a little bit of fun doing a very short time-lapse video of sunrise using my intervalometer on my Nikon D7000. 

After stopping to take some shots of the sunrise, we continued on up the trail. The trail was fairly steep and kept our heart-rates going. Soon, the trail went around this huge rock feature and then dumped us out with a huge view of Pikes Peak and the Cog Railroad, which was pretty impressive. 

The rock near the trail was very classic Pikes Peak Granite, with features very similar to those of outcroppings found in Lost Creek Wilderness Area. A truly fun playground, as Sarah was able to demonstrate.

Ethan and I both enjoyed the view of Pikes Peak from this location.

 The terrain was like a playground of sorts, with all kind of really cool features.

We took a few more pictures and then we were on our way up to the next section of the trail.

Soon, the trail opened-up again and dumped us out onto a very flat area which was the middle section of the hike. From here, we could see Cameron Cone finally - it seemed a lot futher away than I think we were anticipating. We could also see the Magog Ridge and Magog Rock. For the rest of the hike we all jokingly coined the phrase "Oh-my-Gog."

We went around the huge Magog Rock, which was one of the cooler features I'd seen. It had this smaller rock perched above it which made us all wonder how the heck something like that could even happen.

Ethan took many opportunities to take photos of it as well. 

We followed a small road for a ways and then found the trail leading up to Cameron Cone, as advertised. Indeed, the trail was faint and sometimes hard to follow. We did find that there were small ribbons tied to trees at various intervals to help mark the way. We lost the trail a couple of times and found ourselves bushwacking through some steep and nasty terrain. Finally, we reached the ridge to the south of Cameron Cone and then ascended to the summit. It was pretty steep and I could understand if people turned back on this climb. It is much harder than it looks, for sure. Once we reached the top, we all enjoyed the view of Colorado Springs to the east and the unique view of Pikes Peak to the west. I busted out my tripod and set it up for some HDR work. Ethan caught me in the act, with Almagre in the background.

The sky was pretty cool for photography and some jet contrails added to the interest level.

One other nice advantage to bringing a tripod is that it makes for easy group photos.

On the other side of the summit, the views of Colorado Springs, Waldo Canyon, Williams Canyon, Garden of the Gods and Colorado Springs were pretty impressive.

From here, I took a quick panoramic photo of the Colorado Springs area, looking northeast, east and southeast.

We spent about an hour on the summit and then head back down. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful, albeit full of great conversation with some really great friends. I left with one parting shot of Pikes Peak. 

Overall, Cameron Cone is a great hike! It is tougher than it looks and demands some respect when climbed from Barr Trail. Also, good route-finding skills are also required. 

The views of Pikes Peak on this trip are totally worth the hike and are quite unique. You won't be disappointed if you choose this mountain that is off the beaten path.