New Toy!

Now that I’m more familiar with my camera and its limitations, I realized that I’m ready for a new lens.  Santa brought my gift early and I got a new 50mm f/1.4G SIC SW Prime Nikkor Lens!

 

I had no idea how to go about buying a new lens or what I wanted. There were wide-angle, standard, telephoto, super telephoto, wide-angle zoom, standard zoom, high power zoom, and so much more! What does all that mean?!  What’s the difference? How do I know what I want? In my research machine’s research, he found this article which is super helpful. Doug didn’t know anything about cameras, lenses or their settings. But after reading that document, he learned some basics and understood the relation between focal lengths, apertures and shutter speed.

After reading the step by step instructions in that document, getting input from a few people and reading reviews, I knew the 50mm f/1.4 was the one.  If you have a few lenses in mind that you are deciding between (i.e. there were two lenses that were “50mm f/1.4” but had other random letters slapped on the product name), your decision-making can go a lot faster if you check what’s compatible with your specific camera model (i.e. my D5000 is fully compatible with AF-S, but not AF).  This will eliminate some lenses from your options.

One deciding factor in my decision was that I had a hard time at home getting a fast enough shutter speed to capture Mia now that she’s very active.  Even with all the lights on, at my highest ISO and widest aperture.  I also knew that I wanted more bokeh (blurry backgrounds) in my pictures so I needed a lower f-stop. I also hear prime lenses have way crisper pictures, so I look forward to that.  However, I think it’ll take some time getting used to not having a zoom.  I’ll have to be patient with my practice and we shall see how it turns out.  If the weather is generous, I'll be taking more family/Christmas pictures this weekend, so you can be the judge!