Nikon Nikkor 135mm f/3.5 AI

Nippon Kogaku had a 135mm f/3.5 in the lineup almost from the day the Nikon F shipped in 1959, the Nikkor-Q with its four-element design, and the design never really left. By the time the AI version arrived it had been refined and recoated, but the bones were the same long-serving optic. The Automatic Indexing ridge on the aperture ring, the milled coupling that lets the body read the f-stop without the old metering prong, dates to the standard Nikon rolled out in 1977. It existed because every working kit of that era ran 35, 50, 135. The 135 was the reach lens, the one you mounted for a head-and-shoulders frame across a room or a tight slice of a landscape, and Nikon built it small and cheap enough that nobody thought twice about owning one.

Stopped down to f/5.6 or f/8 it is genuinely sharp, with the even, well-controlled contrast that makes Nikkor glass of this run easy to print. Wide open at f/3.5 the center holds up better than the price suggests while the corners trail off and overall bite drops a notch. The out-of-focus rendering is plain and well behaved. You are not buying this for swirl or for backgrounds that fall apart. At 135mm and f/3.5 you get clean subject separation and a focus falloff gradual enough to flatter a face. Skin tones print neutral and backgrounds stay soft without distracting from the subject.

Who shoots it: anyone who wants telephoto reach on a manual Nikon body without paying for or hauling the faster glass. It works for portraits at a polite distance, for candids, and for travel and documentary frames where a stop of speed matters less than the weight in the bag. The multicoated AI version handles backlight reasonably, though a hood is worth keeping on against veiling flare when the sun sits just outside the frame. Build is all metal and the focus throw is long and smooth, which suits the deliberate way you frame at this length.

The honest weakness is the maximum aperture. f/3.5 is slow for a short tele, and indoors or at dusk you will be wishing for the 135mm f/2.8 or the manual-focus 135mm f/2 AIS that Nikon also made. Those give you a brighter finder, faster shutter speeds, and smoother backgrounds. This lens trades all of that for size, weight, and a used price that often lands in pocket-change territory. People still buy it precisely because it is so cheap and so competent once stopped down.

One metering note. Because it is slow and fully manual, meter at working aperture and lean on Zone Light Meter when you are shooting near wide open in dim light, where that f/3.5 ceiling leaves little room to underexpose before shadows fall off the chart. The 52mm filter thread is the standard Nikkor size of the era, so one set of NDs or a polarizer covers this lens alongside most of the rest of the kit.