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Lenses

So let's talk a little bit about lenses, and a lot of things to know about lenses were not going to get totally into everything. But different lenses have different size filter threats, and so seventy seven is not the filter threads on all nikon lenses, but on this twenty four to one twenty lands, you want to pay attention to filter size threads for different filters that you may want to get. Every lens has its own unique lens hood, and I highly recommend using a lens hood, it's blocking extraneous light from hitting the front of the lens, which causes flare problems. And then we're gonna have things obvious on those cameras. Zoom ring, your focal length is going to be indicated right there. Focus ring for manually focusing. We have distance information on the better lenses gives you a little distance scale, so you know your lens is focused right there. General information about the focal length and aperture as well as thie alphabet soup that I'm going to talk about here in a moment. N...

ikon has a lot of letters they like to throw at you when it comes to lenses, our lens mount index. So this is what you want to mount up with the index mount on the cameras to make sure you get your lenses. Mounted up properly and then those cpu contacts that we talked about that are connecting up with the ones in the camera you want to make sure there's a nice clean line of communication between those if there's anything bad happening generally the pencil eraser is thie standard tool for cleaning that up be careful about cleaning up all the be racing shredding I don't know what those are officially called but cleaning them off if there's something on him some dirt that's the best way to clean him off now on the side of the cameras ah lot of ny cons have this kind of mysterious am m a m type switch and this is the manual focus auto focus which so if you do want to put your camera in manual focus technically there are two different ways of doing it. One is on the camera, but I think the better way is doing it on the lens that's the direction that they're kind of heading towards and maura maura there lenses and so in the top scenarios you see here a and m is pretty simple. We have auto focus and manual focus and neither the two shall collide okay it's one or the other now the bottom version is on a more advanced linds in the auto focus mode if you want to grab the manual focus and start focusing, you can do it in the version on top where it's air em you are not supposed to grab the focus ring and start manually turning it it's the way the motors were built there's different types of motors in these lands and so if you have an m a version that's typically a little higher in lands and that's kind of nice because the camera can focus and if you like that's not quite right you can just adjust it a little bit and that's not going to damage the lens in any way all right, so let's address the alphabet soup of nikon letters so defining what some of these things are simple things a f obviously means auto focus. After they brought out auto focus they came out with silent wave motors, which is very quiet and fast focusing. One of the early things that they did is they started adding distance information from the leads to the meter ring system so the camera had additional information toe work on with flash and light meter d x is the format of the smaller size sensor used in cameras like the d three hundred the d seven thousand d fifty one hundred. This camera does not have a dx sensor in it, but we can shoot in that format if we want to we'll see more of that later e d stands for extra low dispersion last this is something that they've typically done on ly with their tele photos, but now it's come into a little bit more there white angles it's basically a special type of coding in order to get the best optical quality out of the glass, they're newer lenses have electronically controlled apertures so there's no longer an aperture in the back of the lens that you can physically turn to open and close it's all controlled electronically through the camera. Most of the newer lenses especially the ones I'm going to recommend our all g lenses these have been around for about the last ten years. Some of the cameras or lenses excuse me are classified is internal focusing this is handy they typically are faster to focus if the front element doesn't move. If you have a polarizer on there it's not going to change and so many of their lenses are now internal focus, sometimes they say it sometimes they don't nikon likes the word use the word micro instead of macro it basically means the same thing. It just means the the lens is pretty good in close up work. They have special micro lenses that focus up very close. They have other lenses that have some micro capability but they're not really full on micro lenses in is kind of the hottest new letter it's it's in style this season the end is basically a nano crystal kolding coding, which they're putting on some of their very highest inland since these days silent wave motor sometimes you will see it as s w m this is basically the same as thie f s lenses that have vibration reduction handy little tool for hand handheld work we'll see his v r and sometimes you'll see aversion to lens, which means they've brought out another version of that lens that is better optically mechanically or perhaps both in both ways. And so these are some of the more common letters so you can see here we have an f s night cor has a very quiet fastball cassim lens seventy two, two hundred that's our focal length it's a two point eight it's a g lands has electronically controlled aperture its aversion to lands they already had an older seventy two, two hundred to eight. So watch out if you're buying on craigslist is it version one? Is it version too? And it's also in edie lands and and and lands on top of it. All right, so we have fx lenses and we have dx lenses from nikon and it can get a little confusing because the dx lenses are very clearly labeled the fx lenses are unlabeled, so if it says dx it's dx if it doesn't say anything, then it's an fx lens and here is the difference between the two the fx lenses are designed for full frame, larger sensors like you have in the d eight hundred the d x is designed for the smaller frame sensor and so is light comes through these lenses. These lenses are designed to provide different size image circles, so the fx lenses designed to cover the full frame of the large sensor in the eight hundred now camera like the d seven thousand has a smaller sensor and thus does not need as big of image over that sensor to get it so they have special dx lenses that worked with him. Now if you have some of these lenses or somebody sells you won, you can put that on your camera and you can use it in a d x mode where your only capturing a small portion of the middle but you're kind of throwing to waste a lot of the goodness of this camera so you're probably not going to want to use a dx lands on this camera if you wanted to take one of your fx lenses and take it down to one of the other d x cameras like a d seven thousand fifty one hundred three hundred potencial de four hundred one of these days you could use it on there you're just not using the whole area around the side you're using just the middle portion of it and while it might seem a bit of a jump I want to talk about the d eight hundred e for a moment because we're gonna talk about lenses and some recommended lenses in the eight hundred e instruction manual, they have a very, very interesting warning that says the slightest movement during exposure can cause blur, and so some recommended techniques for shooting with the e, which doesn't have the anti a leasing filter and has even greater sharpness than the d eight hundred is that you've got to be really careful about taking the right precautions to getting a sharp image. And so these are the precautions that I'm giving you if you're going to shoot a static shub subject so something that is not moving, use a tripod turn the off when you're on a tripod because the will sometimes cause a little bit of blur while you were on a tripod, use the live you magnify in using those magnified buttons so that you can check to see that your focus is truly sharpe don't stop the aperture down too, too far like f twenty two or thirty two on lee go a ce faras necessary for that subject, and then use the self timer or use a cable release so that you're not touching the camera. This camera is of medium format quality and really requires a little bit. More rigid use out in the field of getting these snapshots start subjects now if you're going to get a portrait or something that's moving around highly recommended using the lenses with the v r turned onto normal, using a single point for focus and moving that point from side to side rather than doing focusing lock because your focus can shift ever so slightly and then using the shutter speed. Normally, in my classes, I recommend one over the focal length. Now nikon is recommending three times the vocal length, so if you're shooting with the fifty millimeter lands that's one hundred fiftieth of a second, so maybe a hundred twentieth, two hundred two, fiftieth of a second. So you really got to be critical about getting the sharpest while this applies to the eight hundred e if you own a regular d eight hundred, you might be wise to follow these as much as you can for getting the sharpest out of this camera when it comes to the d a hundred e nikon recommends on lee some of their lenses, they're especially recommending lenses that they call enhanced sharpness lenses. And so this is a list there's about sixteen lenses here of lenses that they say are really good lenses, and so these are some of the latest generation prime lenses, the twenty four one for thirty five and eighty five all are one force. These are all really high quality lenses, all of their big telephoto big guns are fantastic. They're two eight lenses zooms are very, very good, as well as their new f for resumes as well. So basically all their kind of consumer grade basic lenses. They're not recommending all of these lenses, except for the macro lenses are over a thousand or well over a thousand dollars, and so if you bought a thirty six megapixel camera, I think you probably owe it to yourself to get one or two or more of these lenses and start filling your bag with these good lenses, and so it does require better lenses, but you're going to get some great results from it. So that's night cons list of it, of lenses that they recommend, and so here is the ones that I'm going to narrow it down to that, I would say, really concentrate on on having. So if you want some great quality zoom's, you're not going to go wrong with their holy trinity of two, eight lenses, so the fourteen to twenty four, twenty four to seventy and seventy two hundred are all great lenses for landscape shooters that fourteen to twenty four must have great lands. I have a little bit of a gripe with it because it's hard to filter on, I want to use filters with that. And so, for your standard, like a wedding shooter, you're going to want to have a twenty four to seventy to seventy two hundred if you're shooting sports the seventy, two hundred, as well as some of their longer lenses. I am also a big fan of the sixteen to thirty five it's on ly f four, but if you're shooting landscapes, you're not shooting at two point eight very often, and you can filter this one a lot more easily, so I like that one for travel photography. I'm a big fan of the twenty four to one twenty it's, relatively compact size it's, a great one lens to hang over the shoulder and travel around with, and I know I might have a few people off right now, but that's always fun to do. Er, I really like this tomorrow in twenty four to seventy lens it's, a brand new lands it's got vibration control in it, and so if you want a twenty four to seventy with vibration control, this is also a nice travel lends could be used for a lot of different stuff it sells for a bit less than the nikon lens and looks to be pretty good. I haven't run it through a full set of tests, but the initial thought from it is that it's a pretty good alternative lens and then some great primes or not, I could go all day on lenses, but I'm just gonna try to keep it to a couple one. And so these prime lenses are just fantastic to twenty four to thirty five and the eighty five. Frankly, if you spent three thousand dollars on this camera and you really want to take advantage of what a three thousand dollar camera khun dio, if you can find a reason and a budget for one of these three lenses, bob, I can't recommend it enough these air just owning one of these you really just know that you are operating at the very highest level that you can go. They've introduced some other lenses that are slightly a step down now, these air once that air not recommended for the eight hundred e, but they're still pretty darn good lenses the twenty eight one eight fifty one for in their new eighty five one eight all of these are really nice lenses, and they're going to be between five and seven hundred dollars, so if you can't throw the budget you know of nineteen hundred bucks for twenty four. One four. Well, the twenty eight one eight going to self around seven hundred dollars, about a third the price. And you're getting a lot of goodness there. And so those are my favorite lenses. If I had to narrow it down to just a handful of them.