Lessons

Lesson Info

Nikon Prime Lens: Wide Angle

All right, let's work our way into the white angle category. Nikon has been revamping a lot of their lenses, and we're going to see a lot of new lenses from them in here. So this is great for documentary photography, landscape travel type work number of their new orleans is also our opening up quite a bit white, a bit quite a bit whiter on their aperture, so they're going to be pretty good for low light work as well. So let's dive in to our wide angle prime, so this is for full frame cameras. They certainly have a lot more advantages a lot more selection. If you are a full frame shooter. This is one of the downsides of shooting in crop frame is that you just don't have the same selection of lenses when it comes to the primes, either in the tele photos or in the white angles that are dedicated for their system. You can, of course, choose tele photos very easily if you have a crop frame system, but with white angles, the choices are very slim and far between. So for the full frame user t...

wenty forest, twenty eights and thirty five let's, go ahead and dive into each one of these. Thirty five one eight this is a relatively new lands I used to own the thirty five f too so they made it just a third of a stop faster which isn't a big deal they didn't make the lens a bit bigger than the previous thirty five but pretty much all that size is in focus ring and I love it this is like one of the biggest focusing rings per lens and so for anyone who enjoys manual focusing with an autofocus lands it doesn't get too much better than this and so I really appreciate the style and ergonomics of this it does have that manual focus overrides you could of course just grab it anytime you want and when I say the worst thing about a lens is that it's not a zoom that means there's not much to complain about on this lance ok this lens is pretty pretty much about a perfect lens in my mind and it's going to work for a lot of different people my only minor complaint is that I remember my thirtieth two was about two thirds the size so it's grown in size but I think in capabilities it's it's it's improved so I think very nice very high regard to that one thirty five one four this is attractive to a lot of wedding photographers sometimes news photographers who are working in the lowest of light who want a lens of the highest caliber as faras the construction the focusing the optics all of that it is a better lens than the one eight but you are going to pay heavily more than double the price to get this over the fifty one eight and I think for a lot of people you would probably be best off getting fifty one eight and if you really feel like you can take advantage of this then you can upgrade sell the fifty one eight and then move up you know I think a lot of people and this is something we'll talk about towards the end of today buying and selling lenses they feel like they're really nervous because they want to make the right choice people people get perplexed when it is time to make a choice and there's so many choices with lenses and people really feel like they got to make the perfect choice and if they don't make the perfect choice life is just going to be ruined you know they just they won't be able to live and I don't have a problem making a mistake on the lance because you buy the wrong lens you use it for a while then you can confirm that that is not the right lens for you you can sell it get seventy eighty maybe more percent of that your money back take that reinvested in the next one and okay let's say you buy the thirty five one eight and I forget the exact price, but it's like seven hundred bucks, so let's say you spend seven hundred dollars on the lands you use it for a year and a half, maybe two years and you really think it's not quite the right lens for me, so you end up selling it for five hundred fifty bucks you just rented that lens for two years for one hundred fifty dollars, which is an incredibly good deal and so don't worry about this is absolutely perfect I gotta be sure you're never going to be sure you actually try that lens and use it, but this is ah great lands that is better than the one for, but it is bigger it's heavier, you'll notice is if you have to carry this around a long period of time, this is part of the their new siri's and there's nothing official about it, but there is kind of a one point eight siri's from nikon they've been bringing out a lot of these lenses that are at one point eight aperture and they're just really good lenses now they are a bit more money than the previous f two or two eight versions, but I think they're just they're going to be lenses that I think you're going to be around for quite a while because they're just really well designed lenses, they're good, they're sharp bright aperture like the previous version of this used to be a twenty eight two point eight that is a stop in a third faster so that is significantly faster they are using a fair bit of plastics in here but it's it's good plastic if you will so very nice lands highly recommend this little bit pricey now they just introduced a twenty four one eight to replace their old twenty four two point eight and so this just kind of falls right in that line and no one's that I know has ever owned a twenty for twenty eight in a thirty five I remember when I first got into my nikon system I needed to get a collection of lenses because I was working at the paper and so I had a twenty and I got a thirty five and I was trying to figure out twenty four or twenty eight I got twenty eight and then I canceled the order and I got the twenty forks I figured out the twenty eight thirty five too close you generally got to make a choice in there and so have twenty four and thirty five are numbers that are least they're ingrained in my visual memory as far as what I see and what I shoot with and so twenty four one eight great little lands one of the nice things if you want to do astra photography or nighttime photography of the stars you want to things and they're kind of hard to get at the same time you want a wide angle lens so that you can see the heavens as much as you can as well as foreground elements and you want it as fast as possible. The problem is is that the wider ugo, the less fast the lenses typically are and so there's kind of some sweet spots and this hits a price point that is one of those sweet spots. And so if you are looking to do astra photography, this is one of the best ways to do it for under a thousand dollars because it's well, I'd say one of the new twenty we'll find out here in a second let me see if the twenty because there's a new twenty that came out that is also very fast, which would also be in that good spot as well. Still back at the twenty fourth this is there one for this is a match to their thirty five one four in image quality, quality of construction and so forth. And so if you were doing that nighttime photography, this is slightly better because it goes down to one point four versus the one point eight that that we were just talking about, but you are going to achieve best quality results on this lens as on most lenses by stopping it down a couple of stops you're going to get that extra bit of sharpness out of it but beautiful very well made lens we're likely to see this uh in their lineup for quite some time and so from twenty four to thirty five you are going to be paying a premium for those one point four apertures they're very nice lenses they are optically a little bit better construction wise they're a little bit better but they are noticeably bigger and heavier and just to see if we have these over here I'm pretty sure we have something in this category let's see where do these go? Because we got there's the thirty five and where was one of those new wide angles to do and so well we haven't talked about this one yet, but this one will be talking about next and so this is the thirty five one four and this is the twenty one point eight which is very similar in size to the thirty five one eight twenty eight one eight twenty four one eight and so that big manual focus ring is just really nice it's got the focussing scales on there it's got the manual focus override its a little bit smaller and lighter and I know many people I've gone through ah certain purchasing pattern and the pattern usually is is I have no money so I buy the cheapest thing I come by and then I save up some money and I kinda figure out what's good and I buy the best thing that money can buy and then I realized that that's really overkill for what I need and I find a happy medium and I think this would be a happy medium for a lot of people because just that extra weight if you're carrying it around all day like a wedding photographer who works for eight hours a day could really appreciate the fact that this is about half the weight of this this guy right here and that two thirds of a stop just really isn't that important for some people it depends on who you are so think about that pattern and think about what patterns you buy do you usually under by do you usually over by and try to correct for those mistakes as you make further purchases? All right, there is a bunch of classic glass that is kind of older and this is the this is the kind of the collection that I grew up with as faras these air the mainstays they all have a very similar style these air all their kind of there first well it's actually their second generation auto focus because all of these have a slightly wider focussing ring the first generation autofocus had a focusing ring that was half the size and kind of half the thickness so there was barely anything to grab on to at all in there now the thirty five one of the things that I noticed about that is that it focuses really close and so if you want a lens that you can really get very close to twenty five centimetres away you can get very close not that it makes a great macro lens but it is kind of interesting to be able to get that close with a slightly wide angle system now once again these are all the these four lenses that we're talking about here are their standard auto focus which means you can't use it on a three thousand or five thousand siri's camera of today because they don't have the drive shaft which is how these work now it will work on the cam you just can't auto focus but my guess is that somebody who has a d three or five thousand camera really is gonna want these two auto focus but that's the caveat in using these twenty eight two point eight nice good standard wide angle a lot of people like this for travel photography keep this some people will shoot with a twenty eight at fifty and in eighty five and that's that's their only lenses I think the glass has been improved when we get to the newer one eight siri's of lenses they are bigger they're a bit more money this is a slightly less expensive way to get into it but some very nice little lenses and I love the fact of how small these lenses were in fact I'll share with you a trick that's some of my mentors were doing and just pick a couple of small lenses here ups wrong one and you know nikon change their lens caps and it makes it less interesting to do this now and so if you could get their old lens caps it works better and so we're gonna have to get fairly a tight shot so imagine these lenses heir to a little bit smaller lenses what they would do is they would take duct tape and there's some kind of neural edges here and they would duck tape the lens caps together and so it became kind of one big unit and that they could just take one, lands off, put it back on, flip it around in the camera bag and then grabbed the other one off of it like this and so that's how they because then they would have two lenses that we're kind of the size of one lands and all they had to do was just take some duct tape and wrap it right around and because these kind of hell must have gears they just kind of want to lock in and I suppose you could still do that with the modern ones but it was a way of just keeping their lenses in their bag very quickly and easily attached together so nice little trip so those are our collection of classic glass these will be running probably twenty five to thirty percent less than the new lenses, but if I had a choice I'd probably go with the new lenses if I could afford it and I had all the newer a digital equipment that would work with it well, but if you need the older lenses it's nice that they keep these around for everyone who needs that okay let's go really classic now, so they still make a bunch of manual focus lens is and I don't know that there's a lot to say about these lenses in particular other than they're just they're legends in their own time they've been around forever these are standard issue for so many photographers for so many years, and if you do appreciate manual focusing, these lenses are just built so well and they feel so smooth on the focusing it was really a pinnacle and the only comparison that I could make on these is potentially with like a because these were far better than I think any of the other canons and the notice and pen taxes justus first or construction and ease of use and I don't know maybe I'm just slightly biased to nikon manual focus stuff, but this is, uh these air just really beautiful lenses and I've owned a number of them, and I just don't think they were just great little pieces, and I always felt like it was kind of like a cheap like a I couldn't afford a like a with three different lenses because it was going to cost me like, ten, fifteen thousand dollars, but you could buy, you know, a classic nikon fm to you could get three of these lenses and spend probably less than two thousand dollars and be taking pretty much the exact same photos and so twenty millimeters, just so small and one of the things I appreciate it about these manual lenses is that they are really small in size and a lot of the autofocus lenses because we started putting v r and auto focus and other stuff in, and they just kind of bulked up and equipment has not gotten smaller in the last thirty years it's gotten bigger, and here is where we really get down to some really nice small stuff, so I know there's some people who are, you know, like st shooters, and they just want to have one or two lenses in a small little fanny pack, and you could do that so easily with the small manual lenses, and they have a really good, solid field toe, very little plastic on him at the time.