Nikon HB-7 Bayonet Hood

A Nikon Hood is...well a Nikon Hood! That said, better than 3rd party hoods. Delivery excellent.

Excellent add on for your Nikon Coolpix 5700

Cuts out all stray light which produces those annoying dots on pictures. An essential purchase which has improved my live and outdoor shooting no end! Highly recommended!

Utterly sharp

Our Nikon 60mm f2.8 AF D micro lens arrived last Thursday. I've been using its early predecessor, the 55mm AF, for some years, so I sort of knew what to expect. My sceptical colleagues, though, were completely bowled over.

On the surface of it, this is an 'ordinary' 60 mm lens, at f2.8 fairly slow for a prime lens, with a nice smooth feel and a very, very sharp focus at normal distances. On closer inspection, this lens has got two features that you wouldn't expect. The first is a 'limit/full' switch, and the second is an extra set of numbers on the distance scale.

Take the lens close to the subject, and it comes into its own. You can bring it as close as a few centimetres away before it bangs up to the end of its travel, and the extra numbers shows 1:1. This means that the size on the negative or CCD is now the same size as the object itself. At normal print sizes, this means that a bee fills most of the picture, and a hair, or a ring, or the hands of a watch, are shown in dazzling detail.

Nikon calls this a 'micro', but it is in fact a traditional 'macro' lens, executed almost flawlessly.

There are a couple of problems with earlier 'micro' and macro lenses, and Nikon have worked carefully to overcome them. First, there is a tendency for the lens to whirr from one end of its travel to the other hunting for a focus -- for example, if something floats in front of the lens while you are working at normal distances, a micro will happily try to focus on it. This is irritating, and will use up your battery quickly. Traditionally the answer is to switch to manual focus -- and Nikon is prepared for that with a nice, solid auto-manual slider -- but this isn't always appropriate, for example when photographing the aforementioned bee. The solution on this lens is the Limit switch. If you are working at normal distances, switching to limit switches off the macro end of travel. If you are working at macro distances, switching to limit turns off the normal end of travel. Hey presto. Auto-focus suddenly becomes useful again, even at macro distances.

The other problem is that as the lens approaches a close object, less light enters. On my old 55mm you just had to try to account for this somehow -- usually by bracketting. On the new 60mm, the lens informs the camera when it gets near the end of its travel, and the minimum f-stop goes up. At first I thought this was a problem with the lens, like zooms that increase their f-stop as you extend the lens. But, no, it is actually correctly compensating for the changing characteristics.

Beyond that, the 60mm focusses very smoothly, and finds its point of sharp focus much more quickly (and more reliably) than the 55mm did. It has a solid feel, and the picture is utterly, utterly sharp.

I've always loved the 55mm micro. With this lens, I'm falling in love all over again.

Ahh - I can see again!

If you've got the level of short-sightedness I have, you'll know that manual focusing becomes tricky - you either have your glasses on and can't see the composition properly, or off and can't see the focus properly.

This corrects vision so that you can work with glasses off but still see sharply through the viewfinder.

Note when buying - buy the one closest to the actual number on your script - don't allow for the precorrection of -1 in the viewfinder. So, my script is -3.4, so I bought a -3 and then use the D80's viewfinder adjustment to correct more accurately.

You also can't refit the rubber eyecup on top of this - really doesn't matter, but don't bother spending ages trying to make it fit like I did!