Heavy, Old-Fashioned and Bloody Useful

There is nothing delicate about this combination.

Put the Tokina AT-X 24–70mm f/2.8 PRO FX onto a Nikon D850 and you’ve got roughly two kilograms of camera hanging from your shoulder. Add a spare battery, perhaps another lens and all the other rubbish photographers convince themselves they need, and by the end of a long day your shoulders know about it.

But pick the thing up and it makes sense.

The D850 is a substantial camera. The Tokina is a substantial lens. One balances the other. Left hand underneath the lens, right hand around that excellent Nikon grip, eye to the optical finder.

That’s how cameras used to be held.

And it still works.

One Lens, Most of the Job

The attraction of 24–70mm isn’t terribly exciting on paper.

That’s precisely why it’s so useful.

At 24mm, I can photograph somebody and still show where they are. The street, shop, market, workshop or room becomes part of the photograph rather than something turned into anonymous blur behind them.

Move towards 35mm and we’re in classic documentary territory. Enough width to provide context without making everything look stretched and theatrical.

At 50mm, the lens becomes wonderfully ordinary. I mean that as praise. The perspective doesn’t shout. You can simply get on with making the picture.

Then there is 70mm.

Now I can tighten things up. A face, a pair of hands, somebody working, a detail across the street. At f/2.8 there’s enough separation available without turning the background into meaningless mush.

That’s why the old 24–70mm professional zoom became such a standard piece of working equipment.

It isn’t particularly romantic.

It simply covers an enormous amount of photography.

But Can It Handle 45.7 Megapixels?

Yes.

And we can dispense with that argument fairly quickly.

Tokina itself described the optical design as intended to provide sufficient resolution for the emerging 50-megapixel DSLR generation, while independent testing on the D850 has measured strong performance from the combination.

Does that mean every pixel in every corner is perfect at 24mm and f/2.8?

Of course not.

But I’m not photographing test charts.

I’m photographing people.

If someone’s expression is right, the light is right and I’ve caught the moment, I have never looked at the resulting photograph and thought:

Bugger. The extreme lower-left corner could be four percent sharper.

That’s pixel peeping.

Photography has rather different requirements.

The D850 Will Expose Bad Technique

This is the more important problem.

Put 45.7 megapixels behind a lens and suddenly tiny mistakes become remarkably easy to see.

A little camera movement.

A shutter speed that was just slightly too slow.

Focus a centimetre behind the eye.

The D850 records all of it beautifully.

That doesn’t mean the lens isn’t sharp.

It means the photographer wasn’t.

With this combination I’d rather use 1/250 sec at ISO 800 than struggle at 1/60 sec simply because somebody once told me lower ISO means better image quality.

A sharp ISO 800 photograph beats a blurred ISO 64 photograph every bloody time.

Hold the camera properly.

Support the lens.

Watch the shutter speed.

Squeeze rather than stab the release.

The basics haven’t changed because cameras have.

F/2.8 Still Matters

Modern cameras have made high ISO so good that some people wonder whether we still need fast lenses.

We do.

Not simply for exposure.

F/2.8 gives choices.

It allows a faster shutter speed when somebody moves. It gives some control over depth of field. It makes a 70mm portrait quite different from the same picture made at f/8.

And when the Cambodian daylight finally disappears and the streets move into that wonderful mixture of shop lighting, fluorescent tubes, headlights and shadows, f/2.8 becomes very useful indeed.

The D850 already handles difficult light extremely well.

Give it an f/2.8 lens and there’s very little excuse for going home.

There Is a Price

Weight.

There’s no escaping it.

B&H’s hands-on testing reached much the same conclusion: the Tokina is decidedly heavy, but once shooting, they found it a versatile and solid performer with good sharpness.

This isn’t the lens I’d put on the D850 for a gentle six-hour wander when I didn’t know whether I’d take ten photographs or none.

For that I’d rather have a small prime.

The 85mm f/1.8G makes the D850 feel almost restrained by comparison.

But that’s a different sort of photography.

If I’m going somewhere because there may be pictures and I don’t know what those pictures are going to require, the Tokina becomes much more attractive.

Twenty-four to seventy.

F/2.8.

One body.

Get on with it.

And It Isn’t Discreet

Nobody sees a D850 with this thing attached and thinks you’re a tourist carrying a little happy-snap camera.

You’re quite obviously taking photographs.

I’m not convinced that’s necessarily a disadvantage.

Street photography has acquired a peculiar obsession with invisibility. Tiny black cameras, silent shutters and photographing people before they’ve realised you’re there.

Sometimes that’s useful.

But I’ve photographed people for long enough to know that your behaviour matters more than another few centimetres of camera.

Approach people properly.

Don’t behave furtively.

Don’t shove a lens into somebody’s face.

Know when the photograph isn’t yours to take.

And occasionally smile.

It works surprisingly well.

Heavy, Old-Fashioned and Bloody Useful

There are technically better lenses.

There are lighter lenses.

There are newer lenses.

And there are certainly smaller cameras than the D850.

Fine.

But photography isn’t a competition to see who can own the most recently released equipment.

The D850 remains an extraordinary picture-making machine. The Tokina gives it a fast, useful focal range in one solidly built lump of glass.

Put the two together and almost every ordinary excuse disappears.

Too wide? Zoom in. Too tight? Zoom out. Light disappearing? Open it to f/2.8.

Need more shutter speed? Raise the ISO.

Need 45.7 megapixels? You’ve got them.

Now there really isn’t much left to discuss.

There is only the irritatingly difficult bit.

Finding something worth photographing.

And no camera manufacturer has yet found a way of putting that in the box.

— The Old Photographer 📷