LENS-BLOGGING: My biggest Christmas gift was this 12-24 zoom lens for the D70. Sadly, a combination of bad weather and various family duties kept me from doing much with it until today. But just to experiment, I took it with me when I went for a walk on Cherokee Boulevard. As you can see, it’s good for giving your car the long-hood look.
For anyone who’s interested, I put up a gallery of photos over at Exposure Manager. Overall, it seems quite good. I’ve never been a huge fan of wide-angle lenses. Feature photographers like them because they make things look unnatural (the human eye sees things in a manner akin to an 80 or 90mm telephoto lens), and hence “interesting.” And, of course, they’re very useful shooting in cramped quarters. But I really wanted this lens, because I wanted to change my style a bit from my traditional telephoto-intensive approach to something different, and because I’ve been in a number of situations where I wished I had a wider lens. Anyway, it seems quite excellent, and I look forward to giving it a proper workout.
For those with more technical interests, here’s a review by Ken Rockwell, and another by Bjorn Rorslett. And some related earlier posts can be found here and here.
UPDATE: Reader P.J. Swenson emails:
Well, you are going to hate me for this, but giving you a link to this photo/snorkling article will make you travel to this destination. All I ask for is a postcard.
And this is a funny but oh-so-true travel story:
I bought a 28-200G in part on your recommendation, in part because it is a very versatile lens. Now I am going to switch from a d100 to a d70 in part to the DSLR ratings by thom who wrote the articles above, and also because it has a 1/500 flash sync. I highly recommend his books on the d100 and d70.
And when I bought the lens, the adorama seller almost pressured me into buying the d70 at the same time because he said the rebate was expiring at Nikon on the last day of December. It turns out, Nikon extended the 100$ rebate for the d70, and they upped the d100 rebate to $200.
The rebates are good until March 31, so if you wind up buying a camera, or one of several lenses, be sure not to let ’em slide. That’s real money. And here’s an interesting item on wide-angle photography.
ANOTHER UPDATE: David Nishimura emails:
If you haven’t tried it, PTLens is an amazing freeware Photoshop plug-in (works with Elements, too) that will correct the distortion and vignetting so common in digital camera lenses — though it can also be used with digitized images from film cameras. Installation and use is incredibly easy. Won’t work with Macs, however, just Windows and — by command line — Linux.
I haven’t tried it, but I guess I should.