I pondered very hard about what I wanted in my next lens. I found that the 50mm is a very useful everyday lens, its sharp enough, its fast enough, and its cheap! Everyone should own one.
For at least a few times I wished I had a nice "longer" telephoto lens. I thought about a 85-150 range... but I really can't use those in close quarters overall. After looking at my months of photos I posted I said to myself more often than not that "I wish this was wider". So... after all one big advantage of FF/FX is going ultra wide.
I got this list together of all the potential wides I want. I am a prime shooter, I love primes and I don't think there is anything like a prime to push you to use your feet and get creative with that you have.
Okay, so I put a couple zooms in there. Now the primes are reasonably priced in the 250-400 range... which to be honest is cheap in the world of Nikon.
The zooms I listed go from 650-1600, expensive, yes...
So, there you have it... hmmm. So what did I pick!?!
The Nikkor 18-35!
In the spirit of this blog I decided to go as cheap as I could with this list. I decided to go with an ultra wide zoom... the 18-35... new this baby goes for 650ish. I however, have found that this one on the used market is remarkably affordable. How much? Would you believe 275!? Well under half the price of new and fits the spirit of this blog perfectly!
The only thing I didn't like about this lens is that its "slow" the max aperture is only 3.5 at 18mm and 4.5 at 35mm. Which is a shame... but I am hoping that with this lovely D700 we can overcome some of the slowness and regain some depth of field focus. The FF/FX format does give you around 1 to 1 1/2 shallower DoF at each stop. So in reality this isn't so bad.
Now this is considered a "consumer" zoom. Its sharp, but it does have more distortion than more "pro" zooms... however as I said before I wanted to keep the spirit of the blog alive I decided to go with the cheapest option... could I just go buy a more expensive zoom or prime... sure, but that's not what this is about. This is about taking photos. Remember, I am not a lens reviewer... I don't do brick walls or anything. I just go take real world photos and let you see for yourself.
In case you are wondering what kind of photo you can get with the 18mm wide end... well I'll show you:
This is a perfect example of why ultra wides are so nice indoors. This is very tight quarters and my brother is maybe three-four feet away from me and I am at the corner of the room. They make for great environmental portraits.
Snowman that we built this year.
So much work!!!
The making of the Snowman, my brother adding the final touches.
Okay... so now for my Photo of the Day!
I was just leaving a customer site and I saw some oil in water... while we all have seen this before, I had never really seen what it looks like when its starting to ice over...
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