Tokina 85mm F1.8 Review
Hello everybody and welcome to my first ever blog post, I don’t know how often I’ll do these but I was sat here thinking today that I could repurpose some of my scripts from my videos into blogs for you to read. Don’t expect these to be the best blogs you’ve ever read but I hope you can appreciate them nonetheless.
You can watch the video I made about this lens at the bottom of the blog post, or click here
I wanted to buy an 85 mm lens for a while and there are multiple reasons for it, these may be some of the reasons you may be interested in one too.
The first reason is pretty self explanatory but it's I like the look that an 85mm lens give your photos. It's a slightly more telephoto lens than I have had before, the more zoomed in your lens is, the more compression it has. Meaning everything in your photo will look a little more squished together than it would on a 35 mm lens for example. This is a look that I really like and looks great on photography genres I enjoy, such as Automotive Photography & Nature Photography.
The second reason, the lens is prime. A prime lens is a lens which cannot zoom in or out, it has a fixed focal length. Why is this a good thing? Well, prime lenses on average tend to be a lot sharper and produce higher quality images than zoom lenses, they do this at the expense of the zoom functionality which is the downside but also an upside of a prime lens. The lack of zooming capability can force us photographers and filmmakers to move our feet to find our composition rather than being lazy and just changing focal length, this helps to make us more creative and produce better images.
The third and final reason is that the lens will allow me to get more light into the lens and onto the sensor. The lens has a maximum aperture of F1.8 which is really wide open, not only does it give you the classic and very sort after shallow depth of field and bokeh, but more importantly to me, it massively improves the performance of the camera in poor or low light conditions. This gives my A7ii much more life when it comes to low light or night photography because I can have so much more light entering the lens allowing me to have better quality images at night.
So when you get the lens, it is packaged well protected inside a simple Tokina branded box and inside you'll not find much, except the lens and the two caps for the front and rear.
The first thing I noticed as soon as I had the lens in hand was the weight of it. This lens is heavy, and it's no surprise because it’s constructed for the majority out of metal and has very large pieces of glass inside, including a huge front element that you will most definitely want to protect.
The lens in hand isn’t too large but certainly weighs a lot.
The lens is not weather sealed, which is a small downside but can be worked around. I’m not quite sure why lenses without weather sealing are still made but nevertheless here we are.
There are no buttons or switches on the lens like some of the alternatives out there but I didn't find I was missing anything while using it so I wasn't too bothered about that.
The focus ring is made of metal, which can split opinion as it will scratch easily, I again am not too fussed but what I can say is that is a very smooth operation and is very pleasing to use as it has a good resistance to it.
So how was the lens to use and how did it perform?
I’ve taken the lens out on multiple shoots including some client work I did for a bakery, the quality of the photos that the lens produced was exceptional, the photos are very sharp and crisp and the depth of field was as creamy and smooth as expected. The lens not only performs well at F1.8 but also above that too.
I have used it at night and in the poor lighting of the bakery and it produced excellent images in both scenarios with very little help from ISO.
The lens performed just as well in video modes as in photo modes and I was really happy with how the lens coped in difficult scenarios in the bakery while filming.
Unfortunately no lens is perfect and there is a couple things I dislike about the lens...
Firstly the autofocus did struggle a little bit to find a subject to focus on to at times and wasn't as reliable as I would've liked it to be but that could also be a result of my following point which is that the minimum focus distance is quite long, meaning you can’t focus the lens on subjects that are too close to the lens. This could be an issue for some people depending on what you're shooting however may not affect others at all, I wouldn't recommend this lens to any aspiring macro photographers.
Secondly the lens has no in built stabilisation so may be an issue in some situations. However the footage I got handheld and from a gimbal was pretty smooth with only a few minor hiccups so I don't think it is too much of a problem but is something to be aware of.
Finally the weight, this lens is heavy and as nice as the metal construction is, it does make this lens a heavy one. After shooting for a couple hours straight in the bakery my wrists did start to hurt however, this could be me being weak and needing to hit up the gym or just the sheer weight, I’ll let you decide that one! You will certainly come out with bigger arms after using this lens than when you started.
So overall, would I recommend this lens? Does it meet my expectations? Yes and Yes! The lens performs exceptionally well minus the odd autofocus hiccup from now and again and the image quality is superb, it’s a big heavy one but in my opinion is worth every penny you pay.
The lens changes in price frequently so I won't comment on it but within the price it varies it's definitely worth it in my opinion. I'll leave the link to the lens below if you would like to pick it up.
I hope you have enjoyed and found this useful. Have a great day, Cya!
Link to the lens - Click HERE