Daniel Spisak on Technology

Weekend before last I ran across a deal at Sammy’s Camera that I couldnt pass up and I finally broke down and picked myself up a professional digital SLR! I got myself a new Nikon D50 which you can see here:

(Image from Digital Photography Review)

Now having read the reviews of the D50’s 18-55mm kit lens I came to the conclusion that I wasnt going to be too thrilled with the performance of the camera with that lens on it. So I opted to just get the body new and then picked up the Tamron 18-200mm lens as seen here:

Of course after reading some reviews about lenses and how lenses are tested I’ve come to realize there is a much better 18-200 lens that I should be looking to upgrade to! Crazy I realize, having just bought the lens and realizing there is something much better available already. Of course this lens is the Nikon Nikkor 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 ED-IF AF-S VR DX.

What does all of that gobbledygook at the end stand for? The DX means that the lenses optics are designed to work with the smaller senor size of many digital SLR cameras, this allows for savings in weight and size of the lens itself.  ED is Nikon-speak for high quality low dispersion optics. AF-S means it has silent autofocus motors, which is good to have. The best part of all however is that this is a VR lens, which means the lens optics are vibrationally dampened which means that if you shake the camera during a long exposure it can compensate for your camera movements. This is really awesome because the system can gain you up to 4 full F-stops of exposure to shoot with. Also the VR in this lens is a newer system that now has a mode for shooting from a moving vehicle! Of course the Nikkon lens goes for about $750 online which is nearly double what I paid for my Tamron.

Of course this doesnt mean that the lens I got is a bad one, just means I know what my upgrade path is now pretty much since the 18-200 lens will cover the majority of the ranges I’d need to shoot in. However there are some other lenses that I’m interested in potentially down the line like:

Sigma 30mm f/1.8
Nikon 12-24mm f/4

But those are a ways down the road and I need to learn the ins and outs of this new camera first. I still have my old Canon Powershot S45r but its going to probably fall into disuse for the most part as I am trying to use the new camera more to get the hang of it better. I may sell it at some point and roll the funds from it into a Fuji F30 for a better updated pocket P&S camera for when I cant lug the D50 somewhere.

However I do have one particular photo from the D50 that I took last week when it wasnt raining from one of the parking lots at UCI:

Thats all for now!