Camera lens #3

My 'new' Nikon D50 camera came with three lenses. The first is a Nikkor 28-80mm F3.3-5.6 which is the basic kit lens, so it's the one I played with first. The second one is a Tamron 18-200mm zoom lens, which I have been playing with the last couple weeks - seems like that is the lens I'll be using most of the time. The third lens is one the previous owner bought as a spare when he left his kit lens home on a trip, and so it is quite similar to the first lens, it is a Nikon 18-55mm F3.5-5.6. So it covers a range that could be described as wide angle, to not-quite-as-telephoto as the other lenses. For that reason I hadn't been dying to play with it. I'm not even sure I'll keep it, but I popped it on the camera to take a few shots today.

Dave in the office working (with a cat on the printer)

It's hard NOT to be cheerful with these smilin' dogs in the house!

The locust trees are always the last to get their leaves back.

This is the view north over the neighbor's dilapidated barn.

And this was one of those lovely sunsets where the sun is behind the clouds and they light up with a brilliant outline of the light behind them. Clearly I need to figure out how to adjust my exposure on this camera - not only is the detail lost in the clouds, but in the picture of the barn above it the sky is all washed out. I was spoiled by my old camera having automatic exposure bracketing. I just need to figure out how to do it manually on this one.

So my conclusion about this lens was what I was expecting. It kind of covers a range I already have covered just fine with the other two. 

Another thing I have to get used to with the new camera is that it doesn't have a live view on the viewscreen - you have to look through the optical viewfinder. That makes it tricker to aim when you're doing stuff close to the ground. I not only was spoiled by the view screen on my old camera, but it flipped out and rotated around so you could get shots from all sorts of interesting angles. But the quality of the pictures the new camera takes are far superior, so it's worth the trouble to learn to just deal with the new camera!

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