Good Lens but why so expensive?

Good lens to complement the 18-55mm kit lens. However I found an online/ retail shop in central London selling for £177 plus delivery. Also got a filter and a spare battery - similarly lower prices too. It pays to search around.

Brilliant all-round lens

A year ago I got rid off my 28-200mm, that was a good lens but hard work in low light with no VR (Vibration Reduction). I did buy two new lenses but not very practical to carry several lenses whilst on holiday and trying to change lenses whilst on the move is not a wise thing to do.

This lens came in time for my trip. I had my doubts considering the 3.5-5.6 aperture as i got use to having fixed 2.8 aperture, but after reading some of the reviews regarding the VR2 and i needed a descent lens, i decided to take the plunge.

In a few minutes of trying the lens out, i became convinced this lens will be a great companion on my trip. Even in low light (room) by reducing the shutter speed to 5th of a second and aperture at 3.5 and keeping the VR2 at norman mode, the pictures are very clear, without any blurr. This i have not managed to do with other lenses with similar aperture.

The lens features the very useful features of manual and auto focus on the lens. Ideal when the camera has complex focusing to do. It is very quick to switch over to manual focus without having to fiddle with the camera focus control.
The VR has two modes, normal and active. Normal is fine for everyday use, although some sharpness is taken away (at extreme zoom), therefore where possible, keep it off. Active is really for sports and fast moving photography.

In general, the lens is superb and i will highly recommend this for a general lens. It is a step up from a kit lens, but the result and overall practicality out-weighs the cost. This is an all round lens that will suit everyday photography and will take enjoyment to a new level for the photographer who has just purchased their SLR or for the photographer who wants more than the kit lens offers. The next level is the professional type lenses, therefore if you are more demanding, then the only option is to buy separate wide angle lens and telezoom lens, which can set you back around £2000.

In conclusion, the best way to get the very best result is to shoot in manual mode or shutter priority. The lens is superb, colour, sharpness, functionality and all round ability, there really is not a lens that is comparable in this price bracket in terms of quality and results.

Happy snapping

Nikon's Creative Lighting System is AMAZING

I've been a keen amateur photographer for 35 years and have always been uncomfortable using flash light. Until now.
Flash often meant hit-and-miss results, poor exposure, ghost-like flesh tones, horrid colours, stark shadows, not to mention red-eye. But this changed when I started using a Speedlight SB-800 on my D200... consistent balanced exposure and great colour. But that's just the start of it. Using the D200 as controller of multiple Speedlights opens up a whole new world in photographic lighting. Admittedly the apparent complexity of using multiple Speedlights is, at first, rather daunting! Here Simon Stafford's Magic Lantern Guide"Nikon AF Speedlight Flash System" is helpful. I've added 2 SB-600s to my Speedlight system. I set each Speedlight to"remote", use the SB-800 as key light, one SB-600 as fill, and one SB-600 to light the background. Then all the control is from the camera. In the D200 menu the exposure value of the Speedlights can be dialled up/down in 1/3 ev steps. All TTL-metering and, of course, wireless. After one practise shot it's easy to dial-in the required values and then it's plain sailing... shot-after-shot perfectly exposed with great shadows and wonderful flesh tones. Use bounced light, different positioning/configuration of Speedlights, diffusion dome, coloured gel filters ... all is factored-in by the system to give astonishing results. A veritable portable studio!
Note: I found that while Nikon's user manuals explain the use of each component of the CLS, I had to search around to find a clear & simple explanation of how to use multiple Speedlights! Nikonians.org has an article entitled"Nikon D200 and Nikon's Creative Lighting System" which is most helpful.

I love this lens but it does have flaws

I bought this lens and took it straight on safari, pairing it with a D80. I took about 2,000 shots with it over two weeks and some of the results are great. Most of the time of course I was shooting at 300mm with VR on in very bright light and it performed pretty well. It is particularly good at close focus (but it's not a macro) and generally good for fast-moving wildlife. It's sharp right through to 300mm but not razors (but hey, if I could afford £6,000 for a Nikon prime telephoto I would have bought one). Just two complaints - the autofocus sometimes gets a bit lost and hunts, and the manual focus ring slips so that it sometimes can't be focussed at all (clearly this is a fault and I'll get it fixed when I have a chance). Overall I'm very happy with this lens, but I will upgrade when I can.

Great lens for the price

Can't see the problem the previous buyer had with this lens.
Superb lens, pin sharp, F1.4 for lovely hand held low light shots.
A simple reliable lens. Well worth the money

Extraordinary lens made useful by digital

This is a made-for-digital fisheye lens with rapid focussing, incredible depth of field even at f/2.8, and relatively low chromatic aberration. Owners of Nikon Capture who shoot raw NEF footage can convert fisheye images taken with this lens to ultra-wide pan shots, although there is a trade-off of quality and size.

I've owned the DX fisheye for about a year now. Digital technology has now rescued what would traditionally be seen as an effect lens. Despite initial misgivings, this is one of the most useful lenses in my bag, and it's so small and light that it goes with me everywhere.

Fisheye lenses are 'uncorrected' ultra-wide angle lenses. Traditionally they come in two types. A 'true' fisheye gives a circular 360 degree image on the film or sensor, while a full frame fisheye gives about 180 degrees from corner to corner, but fills the entire frame. The Nikon 10.5 DX is full frame, which most people would agree is the more useful variant.

By 'uncorrected' we are talking about rectangular distortion. The lens is in fact heavily corrected for chromatic aberration, although the extreme angles by which light enters the lens mean that there will always be breakup at the edges. The rectangular distortion means that only straight lines which pass through the centre of the lens appear straight. All others are curved, with the curve becoming more prounounced the further you get from the centre.

'Classic' fisheye pictures give the impression that the world is about the size of a pingpong ball, as seen in the film 'Le Petit Prince' and on the cover of Mike Oldfield's 'Hergest Ridge'. As this is a rather specialised application, fisheyes were always seen as a special effect, and relatively few photographers owned one, while still fewer carried it with them. Nikon, therefore, went out on something of a limb by releasing the DX fisheye before many other more general purpose digital lenses.

Two things make this far more useful as a digital lens than the film equivalent would be. First, as already mentioned, Nikon Capture is able to convert from fisheye to ultra-wide. This substantially increases chromatic aberration at the edges, and the results are certainly not pin-sharp at the corners, but the feature does dramatically increase the options. An alternative choice is Panotools for Photoshop. Secondly, the fact that you can shoot as much as you want, preview it instantly, and delete what doesn't work means that you can afford to take far more risks than you ever could on film.

I use this lens for three kinds of shots.

First off, putting the horizon in line with the centre of the lens makes for the least distortion in landscape shots, and non-photographers often won't spot that the picture is fish-eye at all. This messes up the rule of thirds, but there will be so much foreground and sky that I can crop to my heart's content. I can correct for rectangular distortion in Capture or Photoshop if I want, but often this is not necessary.

Second, this is an excellent portrait lens (no, really) for capturing someone in situ. For example, if you put someone in the corner of their office, occupying only the central fifth of the frame, everything in their office will seem to curve round and surround them. There's no need to worry about the sharpness of the subject, because the depth of field is so great. As before, I can crop to my heart's content after the fact. As an alternative, I can just walk up to an individual or a group and press the trigger, without worrying about focussing speed, centre of focus or even composition, because I know that everything will be sharp.

Third, it does sterling service for the kind of effect shots that can't be done after the fact in Photoshop. There's great fun to be had photographing the world from the top of a castle, and (rather more usefully) a lot to be done by standing on a chair and shooting a portrait from above. The close focus range on this lens is a very few centimetres, so you can get special effects of quite small objects.

So, is this special-use lens worth the money? Most of my work is for publication in the press or in advertising campaigns. Local papers are always looking for arresting images, and the fisheye is a good choice for conjuring something special out of a fairly ordinary situation. For advertising it does double service, as a workhorse to capture what otherwise couldn't be got, such as the entire palace of Westminster from over the road, and partly for the same kind of effect shots that go to the press. For the price of an afternoon's shooting (whether you are buying or selling), this is a lens that pays for itself quickly.

For the hobbyist or enthusiast: if you can afford it, this lens is great fun.

Sensible purchase

Protect your lens with a filter. Not much experience, but this set of filter has not affected picture quality on my D40x. Actually lost my lens cap, so the filter saved my lens! Alternative would be Hoya pro range, but suitably more expensive

Do Not Buy this: OBSOLETE

I'm sure this is a good lens but DO NOT BUY IT, there is a new identically priced version with VR shake reduction, make sure yours has this feature as it will make all the difference at telephoto.

Excellent lens but focussing is very slow.

The title says it all really. Highly recommended unless you need fast focussing for action.

Ideal lens for digital, but the aperture is disappointing

35mm is a bit of an unusual lens for a 135 size SLR. 28mm is the 'standard' wide-angle lens, although many photographers have opted for the slightly wider 24mm in recent years. This may explain Nikon's reluctance to really invest in this length of lens - the relatively slow f2 aperture compares poorly with Nikon's 50mm offerings, and even the 28mm is available - for a price - at f1.4.

Everything changes, though, with the advent of digital SLRs. Nikon's D1, D2, D75 and D100 all use a CCD which is the same size as APS rather than 135 film. The result is that all lenses behave as if they were about 1/3 longer. The humble 35mm is thus the equivalent of a 55mm, which is as close to the 50mm 'normal' length as makes no difference - at least until Nikon come up with a 33mm lens.

'Normal' lenses are the least exciting but most ubiquitous, and if you only intend to own one prime lens, you probably owe it to yourself to make it that one.

So how about this lens? I personally found the f2 maximum aperture to be more of an annoyance than a problem. I grew up on f1.8 lenses, and was never willing to shell out the extra for an f1.4. f2 really isn't that much slower - it just feels like it is.

For the rest, this is a nice, light compact lens with internal focusing so your polarising filter doesn't go spinning round when you don't want it to. In common with its 135 size 50mm equivalent, it gives a picture which is very close to what the eye sees. We found that its shortest focal distance was attractively close, although this isn't, of course, a macro lens.

One other benefit of using this with a digital Nikon SLR is that the smaller CCD size reduces the effect of aberrations, and this is therefore a 'better' lens on digital than on 135.

The alternative is to go with a Nikkor ED (extra-low dispersion) zoom. In principle the quality of a prime lens like this should always be better than any zoom. In practice Nikon's ED glass is so good that you don't see much difference. However, this lens is markedly better than my budget Nikkor 24-120 which I got with the camera (and don't really use much any more). If you can afford money, the ED zoom is probably worth it. If you are on a budget, though, and want to max out on quality with flexibility, this is a good buy, despite the disappointing aperture.