Nikon 13mm f/5.6

              Ultra-Rare Nikon 13mm f/5.6 ‘Holy Grail’

 

 

The 13mm is Nikon's greatest lens. It is Nikon's greatest lens because not only is it big and supremely expensive, it is Nikon's, and perhaps photography's, greatest lens because it lets us make photographs we can make no other way.

The Nikon 13mm is the world's widest non-distorting professional SLR lens ever made, by anyone, in any format. It allows us to get closer to our subjects, stretch distances and create images from perspectives otherwise unimaginable.

Forget about ever seeing one; only about 350 were made, and only to special order. That means less than one out of every 100,000 lenses Nikon has ever made is a 13mm. Forget about finding one anyplace other than eBay, where they turn up a couple of times a year in various places around the world.

The creation of each sample of 13mm lens was always met with much fanfare in Japan. Rumor has it that not only was each lens blessed by a Shinto priest, but that domestic (Japanese) customers were invited to their lens' ceremony.

I've wanted one of these 13mm lenses ever since I first read about it in the 1970s.

In the 1980s I made a pilgrimage to Nikon House in Rockefeller Center, New York City, just to see one. Nikon House was a promotional operation that offered free cleanings and showcased all Nikon products. It wasn't a store.

I asked if I could touch one, and I was granted my wish. I wasn't allowed to walk outside to take any pictures, but at least I got to see one. Wow. Think the newest 14-24mm zoom is a pig? This 13mm is 20% heavier and 20% bigger around!

I never saw one again until recently, when by virtue of the fact that the whole world recognizes me via this website, I was invited to Dubai by a collector. This means I've only seen two in over thirty years of looking, and for all I know, the one in Dubai may have been the same sample I saw at Nikon House.

This is why photographers call it the Holy Grail. We know it's out there somewhere, but we doubt we'll ever find it, even if it was shown in every Nikon catalog and brochure for about twenty years. Nikon was always screwing with us by waving this $10,000 lens around every chance they got. You'd never see it at trades shows or in person: it was only seen in the catalogs. It always turned up in every camera brochure, since every camera brochure listed the lenses towards the back of the flyer.

Like the Holy Grail, but unlike many other expensive photo trinkets sought by whack-job collectors, the 13mm has always been an extremely useful lens, even when new. It has always been ridiculously expensive, used or new, precisely because it is so universally useful to creative photographers.

Even if it wasn't so useful and unique, the simple fact that every collector seeks it is another reason its price remains crazy. No Nikon collection is even half complete without at least one of these. Collectors are funny; serious collectors will have at least three of these, one in each version made over the years.

Big, long, telephoto lenses are not great, even though they impress beginners.

Every camera maker: Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Pentax, Zeiss, Leica, the Russians and more, all make big telephotos. So what? Photography is about getting close. Long lenses are for photographers who lack the skills to get close.

Great animal photographers know how to get right up to wild animals; they don't need 400mm lenses. Great sports photographers get themselves invited to the athlete's home or out onto the field; they don't get stuck in a press box a mile away.

Jamming a telescope onto your camera doesn't make it a great lens, and having to shoot from that far away not only makes for uninvolving photos, the intervening air, air currents, heat waves, haze and etc. all add up to weak images. Any amateur astronomer has bigger, longer optics to attach to their cameras than anything made by camera companies.