bikes and things

I often get asked this and my reply usually is “How much do you want to spend?“. The discussion inevitably ends up with a Nikon mid range DSLR camera with a crop sensor. But then at this price range the kit lens is always going to be completely crap. I’m not the only one who thinks like this it seems.

I’d go further and suggest that you shouldn’t buy an SLR if you only ever plan to use its kit lens or an inexpensive zoom lens. Kit lenses and low-end zooms produce blurry, distorted, drab images — they can look decent on blogs or phones, but the flaws become apparent when you see them on big Retina screens or printed at larger sizes.

I always recommend that people buy a 35mm prime lens, which is roughly the equivalent of a 50mm lens on a full frame camera. Before I went full frame I had a D300 which I used a Nikkor 35mm ƒ1.8 which is a complete bargain at £150. It’s sharp, compact and unobtrusive, fast and is one of the best ways of improving your photography in my opinion. Whilst it suffers from a little vignetting wide open and a tiny bit of pincushion distortion these are both easily corrected for in the latest version of Lightroom with the tick of a box. It’s also one less thing to distract you from actually taking good pictures. Zooming around trying to improve the composition seems to be fatal to progression. Zoom with your legs and just take more bloody pictures.