This is the widest of three new Nikkor ‘PC-E’ or ‘perspective control’ lenses. This 24mm Nikkor acts as a wide-angle on full-frame bodies like the D3, D700 and D3x, and as a 36mm (approximately) on a DX-format Nikon.

Perspective control lenses are used widely in architectural photography. This is a discipline which requires perfectly straight lines and certainly not the vertical ‘keystoning’ effect usually seen when shooting tall buildings. Keystoning is caused when the camera has to be tilted upwards to get the whole subject in the frame.

The only way to avoid keystoning is to shoot with the camera perfectly horizontal, but this is not always possible. You may not be able to get far enough back from the subject, and even if you can you’ll have to crop off the superfluous bottom half of the picture after you’ve done so.

The other alternative is to correct the keystoning distortion later, using Photoshop’s Transform or Lens Correction tools. This does have a harmful effect on the image quality, though, because it’s effectively blowing up and distorting parts of the image. You will also end up with blank ‘wedges’ at the frame edges, which have to be cropped off.

Perspective control lenses like this 24mm Nikkor take a different approach. They have a vertical ‘shift’ movement, which lets you get tall buildings in the frame without having to tilt the camera. This kind of lens ‘movement’ is standard in many large-format studio film cameras, incidentally, and also on sheet film ‘view’ cameras, where it’s called ‘rising front’.

But this Nikkor also has a ‘tilt’ movement, and this is designed to offer a very different kind of correction which is especially useful in close-up photography. Depth of field is very limited at short focusing distances, and while this isn’t a problem if your subject is on a single plane that’s perpendicular to the camera, this is rarely the case and you usually find yourself working with subjects on an angled plane. It’s often impossible to get enough depth of field for the whole subject to come out sharp, even at minimum aperture.

This lens’s ‘tilt’ movement, though, exploits the rather technical ‘Scheimpflug principle’ to get an angled plane sharply in focus from front to back. This is a standard technique with many large-format cameras.

These movements do make the Nikkor quite complicated to use. With both movements locked down in their ‘zero’ position, it’s possible to use it handheld like any other lens, but the moment you start to experiment with the lens movements, it needs to go on a tripod. You need both hands free and a fixed camera position to make the small, precise perspective adjustments needed.

Note too that it’s possible to apply tilt or shift movements on one axis only. The whole body of the lens will rotate through 90 degrees on the camera to offer a vertical or a horizontal shift, but you can’t apply both horizontal and vertical shifts at the same time. This is a limitation, though not a major one. The other point is that the moment you apply shift or tilt, the camera’s autoexposure stops working in a predictable manner and you need to switch to manual exposure. This is a feature of the design and not a fault as such.

Build quality is first-rate, as you’d expect at this price, though there are one or two handling glitches. The adjustment screws and locking knobs stick out a fair way on a body that’s already a little ‘fatter’ than usual, and this will limit movement on some camera bodies. The other is that the locking screws don’t seem to go quite tight enough, and it’s too easy to accidentally ‘tilt’ or ‘shift’ the lens during normal handling and not notice you’ve done it.

The resolution tests produced figures a little lower than were expected, given that the Nikkor was tested on a full-frame D700 body, but parallel tests with Nikon’s new 50mm f1.4 suggest this is just the results of the interaction between the D700’s style of detail rendition and the Imatest software used to analyse the results. As we explain in our testing boxout opposite,

the results are always relative – they show a lens’s properties relative to others on the same body, and comparisons between different bodies and lens combinations are misleading.

Once it gets into its stride at around f5.6, the 24mm Nikkor produces very consistent resolution figures. It’s not quite as sharp as the 50mm f1.4 (reviewed next month), but bear in mind that this lens is designed specifically for perspective control and has a far larger image circle.

This is an expensive and specialised lens, and it takes a little time and patience to use correctly, but it does things no regular wide-angle can. Its wide angle of view and range of movements make it perfect for architectural photography, though for still lifes, one

of the longer-focal length PC-E Nikkors might be more suitable.

Final Verdict This is an excellent lens for indoor or outdoor architectural photography, where space is tight and there are few choices of viewpoint OVERALL

Our lens reviewer, and technical expert, Rod is a veritable photographic encyclopaedia. His illustrious CV has seen him write for many mags, websites and journals.