Nikon’s Nikkor Z 135mm f/1.8 S ‘Plena’ is designed to minimize vignetting, maintain rounder bokeh edge-to-edge and produce sharp images with exceptional clarity. Nikon seems to have put a lot of thought into making a lens that maintains a high quality of light and smooth fall-off to create depth of field with gradual gradations.
The resulting lens feels tailor-made for portrait and studio photographers using Nikon’s Z-series cameras. What better way to test these claims than to take it to the streets of Seattle to make portraits? In our latest sample gallery, we take a closer look at the fine detail of skin and hair, bokeh performance at the edges, and depth-of-field, and we even manage to get people in motion and freeze some rain mid-drop.
It should also be noted that this sample gallery was created using a pre-production model of the lens, so Nikon restricted our sharing of lens images to out-of-camera JPEG images in our sample gallery. As soon as we get our hands on a production version of the Plena, we expect to shoot Raw+JPEG samples, as is our standard practice. Please keep a look out for those updates.
View our Nikon Nikkor Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena’pre-production sample gallery
Note: Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter/magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page). We make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing (in conjunction with this review); we do so in good faith, so please don’t abuse it.
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