A Wide Angle Lens on a DX Camera, Even Wider on a Film Camera

I selected this lens for the purpose of shooting architectural interior photography with the new Nikon D200 DSLR body. The Nikkor 14mm f2.8D ED AF lens is a very stoutly built lens weighing in at over 23 ounces, as it consists of 14 all glass elements, set in 12 groups including 2 Aspheric and 1 ED elements. Since the D200 uses the DX sensor, the magnification of the DX sensor at 1.5X makes this lens equivalent to a 21mm in the film world, covering a view angle of 90 degrees. This same 14mm if used on a film body would cover a view angle of about 114 degrees.
The ability to adjust and save white balance settings allows one to shoot in just about any lighting condition and either have the white balance correct from the beginning or corrected in Photoshop when shot in the RAW file format. This lens features a very convex front element that is susceptible to dust and fingerprints as it is barely protected by an integral scalloped or flower type hood. A soft leatherette hood with draw string serves as the lens cap/cover for the rear element and a standard plastic cover is supplied for the rear element. Shooting with this lens is like any extreme wide angle lens where the optics will have a tendency to bend horizontal and vertical lines, so the superimposed grid in the D200 viewfinder helps a great deal in lining things up to minimize this effect. The simple ability to capture a photograph of tight interior spaces with this lens makes it an invaluable tool for architectural photography short of using a tilt/shifting lens.
As a photo-journalist this lens lends itself for use in shooting environmental portraits of people where they are the central focus of the photograph, using the wide angle to gather in the surroundings in which that person or persons are situated. Technically this lens is very sharp, exhibiting very little if any vignetting at the corners of the image. Common in lesser quality wide angle lenses where the photographic image appears to be a brighter circle in the center with noticeable darkening at the corners of the rectangle. By simply stopping down the Nikkor lens eliminates any trace vignetting if present at all. This lens focuses as close as 8 inches from the subject and is extremely easy to focus, by nature in the lens design, the depth of field is always quite deep. I find myself using the wide angle lens as my standard lens in many instances and will put this one to a great deal of use with the new D200.