New fishy lens

Well it’s actually a fisheye lens. An AF Fisheye Nikkor 10.5mm 1:2.8 G lens to be exact.

Here are pictures of the lens. Being a prime lens it is quite small and light.

This is a picture of the lens attached to my D80

The main benefit to this lens is it gives a very wide field of view. 180 degrees in fact. Considering the fact that my 10-20mm lens only gives a field of view of about 100 degrees, that is quite an improvement.

Of course this doesn’t come without a cost. The main problem is barrel distortion. Straight lines that aren’t in the center of the image appear curved. The further they are from the image the more curved they are. It’s also possible to get some chromatic aberration, coloured fringes around objects, though I haven’t seen any in the test images that I’ve taken.

These are some shots that I’ve taken so far outside my flat.

This one shows off the distortion

Of course this distortion can be fixed using software, leaving a regular, very wide angle view.

I’ll write more about the camera when I’ve had a chance to use it a bit more and get used to it.

Nikon D300

A few months ago Nikon released updates to their prosumer and professional lines with the D300 and D3.

The D3 is obviously better but for me the fact that it’s a full frame camera is a disadvantage. Unlike most full frame cameras I would be able to use my DX lenses with it but at a greatly reduced resolution. Buying a very expensive 12 megapixel camera and then fitting lenses that only let you work at 5 megapixels does seem to be defeating the purpose.

So the D300, which has the same resolution but with a DX sensor, is the more interesting one for me.

DPReviews has just done a review of it.

Some of the advantages over my d80 are: improved resolution, dust reduction, faster continuous shoot mode, better noise reduction and weather seals.

A summary of the review is, I want one.

I’m due to get some money at some point (hopefully this year) and I’m in two minds about how to use it. Get a D300 or buy some better quality lenses.

The conventional wisdom is: If you buy mediocre lenses and a great camera in five years you’ll have mediocre lenses and an obsolete camera. Whereas if you buy great lenses and a mediocre camera, in five years you’ll have great lenses and an obsolete camera.

That points to updating my lenses but it’s harder to know what constitutes a good lens. With cameras it’s pretty simple

D3 > D300 > D80 > D40

The numbering doesn’t really make sense but it’s easy enough to remember. With lenses though there’s a lot more choice which makes things trickier.

Decisions, decisions.

New lens

I got a new lens today. It’s a Nikkor 50mm 1.8D. I bought it because till now I didn’t have any fast lenses.

I’ll write more about it in the next few days.