AF Micro-Nikkor 60 mm f/2.8 D

I use the 60/2.8 when I travel with my AF ED 18-35/3.5-4.5 D and the AF ED 80-400/4.5-5.6 VR. It's a "normal" lens, which fills the focal length gap between the two zooms. It's an incredibly sharp portrait lens with my Nikon DSLR cameras. I can use it at full aperture and obtain very beautiful portraits, with just one eye on focus, with stellar sharpness, reduced depth of field & nicely blurred backgrounds. 

Being a macro lens, it reaches 1:1 on its own, without any accessory.

At the minimun focus distance, its effective focal length is 55 mm (see the plot below). This lens should not be used at wide to mid apertures at infinity: soft borders are clearly visible on 24x36 mm film due to field curvature. It's also rather difficult to focus manually near infinity. Sharp landscape images are obtained in the f/8 - f/16 range.

In order to get longer working distances when shooting to shy animals, I now use the 60/2.8 mated with the Kenko PRO DG 1.4 X teleconverter (before using DSLR cameras I used the Nikon TC-14 A). The resulting 84 mm f/4 macro lens allows to take 1:2 pictures at 30 cm instead of 25 cm, thus increasing by 5 cm both the focusing and the working distance. When the lens aperture is set to f/8-f/11 the image quality is very very very good. In my opinion, it's the sharpest AF Micro-Nikkor, namely at short distances (I own the AF 105/2.8 and AF ED 200/4 too).

However, the 7-blade diaphgram does not ensures a pleasing rendition of the out-of-focus areas in close-up images. The unpleasant "bokeh" is more evident at low magnifications, with textured and/or patterned backgrounds. In these cases a better "bokeh" is obtained at full aperture, but obviously you have to sacrifice some depth of field.

Viperine snake (Natrix maura)

Road (Campo Imperatore - Abruzzi - Italy)

Tulip's pistil

Text & images © Riccardo Polini

Effective focal length of Micro-Nikkor 60/2.8 in close-ups.

The AF Micro-Nikkor 60/2.8 has a floating element design. This fact causes a progressive reduction of the focal length (FL) when we focus at close distances. 

I have calculated the effective focal lengths of the lens as a function of the focused distance. In the plot below the results are reported.