Out of the Dark: The Creative Portrait Power of the NIKON Noct Lens
When it was officially released, in October 2019, the NIKKOR Z 58mm f/0.95 S Noct was the fastest lens we’d ever made. It still is. We pointed out then that the Noct was designed to be shot wide open to provide maximum bokeh and incredible performance in low light. “Think night landscapes and astrophotography,” we wrote in an early story about the lens.
That story went on to talk about portrait images Nikon Ambassador Joe McNally took in a coal mine in Romania. He went all in, deep into the dark, because, as we wrote, “If you know Joe's photography, you know he loves to come up with imaginative concepts that often push his creativity and the capabilities of his gear.”
That, too, is still true, as demonstrated by the images Joe recently made with the Noct. They’re portraits, but decidedly different—stylish, imaginative, colorful and compelling, made in a studio by natural light and flash to showcase the Noct’s ability to provide beautiful images with complementary creative backgrounds.
And it’s also true that the Noct is not for everyone, but if you’ve read this far, it’s likely you’re not “everyone.”
Bring Your A-Game
Any photography with the Noct calls for care and planning. "It's a learning experience because of the Noct's critical focus," Joe said of his earlier photography with the lens, and the fact that it’s a manual focus lens, there's no AF to help you out,". Truly, "critical focus" is not just a phrase; at f/0.95, you're measuring depth of field in millimeters.
“Focusing with any manual-focus lens means taking great care; focusing with the Noct means even more,” Joe says. “You have to exert a very exacting control over the camera and lens.”
For the photos here, Joe used the pinpoint focus point and relied on the focus confirm color change—red to green—for verification. In this portrait the point of focus was her right eye. Sunlight coming through a drape of lace formed the patterns. “Any job I do requires a lot of thought,” Joe says. “I had the right studio, the right crew, the props and backdrops to achieve a certain look, and the level of look that I’m going for. I want the pictures to be distinctive. I want to stop people and make them look, make them say, ‘That’s different, that’s interesting.’”
Another available-light photograph thanks to Joe’s composition, the window behind her and the blue sky outside. “For this image, even at f/0.95, I wanted both eyes sharp, so she had to be positioned on a flat plane.”
The precision of the Noct, it’s sharpness and its dramatic drop in depth of field give an edge of difference to the feel of the photograph.
Imagine That
This image is the result of Joe’s deliberate avoidance of the usual look of holiday lights behind a subject to highlight bokeh. “Instead, I built a wall of holiday tinsel and lit it with a variety of colors of gelled lights. That’s a hand mirror in the center, supported by a C-Stand arm, which was retouched out. She’s seated, looking into the mirror, which is five or six feet in front of the highlighted tinsel. I’m literally shooting over her shoulder, into the mirror; she’s not physically in the photo. The tinsel background and the gelled lights become the bokeh elements, and critical focus is on one eye.”
It’s the “optical illusion” element that’s part of the command the Noct provides. “The extreme nature of the lack of depth of field can literally make things disappear or become not relatable to what’s in real life,” Joe says.
“Here it all involves color, light, composition and the beauty and drama of the subject. Then you have to perform at the camera—you’re not photographing her, you’re photographing her reflection. It’s probably my favorite picture of the shoot.”
“This is me harking back to some of the bold-color, dramatic-gesture fashion photography from the Sixties to the Nineties,” Joe says. “I wanted to play with that, to do an odd and fun take on a beauty shot. The Noct was at f/3.2 for this, and the flash was right over her head, with a low fill, a clamshell, but a hard clamshell, not soft light. They don’t have any light shapers on them—they’re just Profoto lights blasting at her. And there were lights in the background—you can see the green on her left temple and blue on the right, flaring at her from the background. Everything is planned out on shoots like this.”
“This is me again, refusing an easy solution like creating a backdrop in the computer. That display of shapes and light are artificial rose petals, a big bunch of them we threw in front of a high-powered fan. I had a continuous hot light in the background as well, mixing with the flash to give me a little bit of a shimmer in the flowers.”
In the Tradition
“Part of creating this traditional portrait was to shoot it in the camera’s square format. I’ve always loved the square format for portraiture, and I’ve set that image area as one of my shortcut buttons—just tap and change." Joe used two flash units for the photo, one on each side, and a simple gray-toned backdrop.
“My friend Nik is a character actor in New York. He’s got a great face for photographs, and the Noct lens has ‘character portrait’ written all over it.” Joe heightened the mood by asking Nik, ten days out from the shoot, to start growing a scruff [beard]. “And we styled him in that kind of drab way.” The effect was perfectly completed by the late afternoon light hitting the wall in the background.
“This is about an hour later, with the lens at f/2.8 because I wanted to get a little more sharpness in his face. Nik often plays a tough guy in movies, but in this instance I was going for something more personal, more interior.”
A Look of Its Own
When he first shot with the Noct, Joe told us that there was something special about it, that it had its own look. He hasn’t changed his opinion. “The precision of the Noct, it’s sharpness and then its utterly dramatic drop in depth of field [at f/0.95] give an edge of difference to the feel of the photograph,” he says. “It’s a lens you need to manage well, and when you do, you have a great deal of creative control. The Noct can create truly stunning imagery."
Joe McNally brings imagination, skill and a “what if” sensibility to every assignment and interest. You can sample some of the photographic results and the stories behind them at his website, joemcnally.com.