The Nikon NIKKOR Z 135mm f1.8 S Plena is a high-performance medium-telephoto prime lens designed for Nikon's Z mount mirrorless cameras.

This 135mm f/1.8 S Plena Lens produces high quality images with beautiful clarity and sharpness. There is a nice amount of contrast throughout the frames and the colours are rich and true to life. This lens is super flattering for portraits, it has a good level of sharpness where you can see plenty of details while still retaining lots of character.

Check out the gear I used:

All photos edited with my Earthy Lightroom Preset Pack!

I am using this lens on the Nikon Z8 and in case you are new to my reviews, I have lots of unedited, straight out of camera photos in my review video below!

Nikon NIKKOR Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena LENS BUILD

This 135mm f1.8 lens weighs around 995 grams, which is pretty standard for a fast, telephoto prime like this. It has an 82mm filter size, maximum aperture of f1.8, minimum aperture of f16 and a minimum focus distance of 82cm. It features an AF to MF switch, 2 customisable buttons, a focus ring and a customisable aperture ring.

Nikon NIKKOR Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena BOKEH

Let’s start by taking a look at what we all came here for - the bokeh! This Nikkor Z 135mm f1.8 features 11 rounded diaphragm blades and wow, the bokeh this lens produces is absolutely stunning. I made sure to capture photos in as many different spots with as much bokeh as humanely possible in our location to have heaps of examples to show you. The bokeh is super round and very clean, there is a beautiful amount of background to foreground separation and I love the out of focus fall out area, its a really smooth transition from in focus to out of focus. You can see this especially in the closeup portraits I took. Even the images taken at f2 and f2.5 have beautiful, round bokeh which you can see in my review video.

Nikon NIKKOR Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena AUTOFOCUS PERFORMANCE

In terms of autofocus performance, I am letting the camera and lens do all the work to see how well it can perform. I have the Z8 set to People Subject Detection in continuous autofocus and I am using a few different focus area modes including Subject Tracking Autofocus, Auto area autofocus and 3D tracking.

I found autofocus of the Nikkor Z 135mm f1.8 S was extremely sticky on my subject as you can see if you are keeping an eye on the picture in picture and I was completely able to rely on it throughout the entire photoshoot. I never once felt the need for a manual focus point. Focus accuracy is fantastic in this lens as well and I did not experience any significant eyelash focusing. I am really pleased to see that the majority of my photos had focus directly on the iris. From my experience, this is a lens you can absolutely rely on and I would expect to see similar results on the Nikon Z9 and Zf.

Below are the photos I captured on the Nikon Z8 and Nikon Z 135mm f1.8 S. The photos in this blog post are all edited with my my Earthy Lightroom Preset Pack. You can see the unedited photos in my review video above.