Lens review

Awhile ago I added Nikon's latest portrait lens to my ever growing equipment collection, the  85mm AF-S f/1.8G is what is known as a prime lens, that means it has a fixed focal length (no zoom), this particular lens is ideal for portrait and wedding photography because 1) 85mm is generally accepted as the ideal focal length for this type of photography, and 2) the f stop goes down to 1.8 which allows the photographer to shoot in low light and also gives a very shallow depth of field (the amount of distance where the focus is still sharp), this shallow depth of field allows photographers to basically blur out the background or foreground which under certain circumstances gives a lovely bokeh (blur) and separates the subject from the background.
To show you what I mean here is an image shot with an f stop of f/16

As you can see, the lady in the foreground is nice and sharp with the lady in the background only slightly out of focus, whereas the next photo shot at f/1.8.

the lady in the background is now totally blurred and the foreground lady is still fairly sharp, but you may notice that the parts of the dress the lady is holding is now slightly out of focus, this is because the depth of field is so narrow at f/1.8 that the distance from the focus point (the top line of the lady's dress) only reaches to the top of her hands (about 2 inches). This is important to know when using low f stops as if you focus on someones eye, the tip of their nose or even their other eye will not be sharp under certain circumstances.

Anyway to the lens, obviously not being a zoom lens means that I have to move around a lot more when framing my shots (some would say thats not a bad thing!) but I have already used the lens in the studio on a couple of portrait shoots and must say I was not disappointed with the results, one grab advantage is that    

opposed to my Nikon Pro zoom 24-70mm F/2.8 I normally use, this one is much lighter and slightly better balanced on the camera.
Conclusion - Definitely a keeper, reasonably priced, excellent results and best of all my arms don't ache after a long portrait shoot ;-))  9/10