Nikon® D5000 Digital Field Guide

Chapter 5. Selecting and Using Lenses

In This Chapter

• Kit Lenses

• Understanding zoom lenses

• Understanding prime lenses

• Wide-angle and ultrawide-angle lenses

• Standard or midrange zoom lenses

• Telephoto lenses

• Special-purpose lenses

• Using Vibration reduction lenses

• Third-party lenses

The lens that you put on your camera is almost as important as the camera body. Some may argue that the lens is more important than the actual camera. There are many different types of lenses, from ultrawide-angle lenses to super-telephoto lenses. The lens that you use depends on the subject you're photographing, as well as how you want the subject to appear in your images. The different types of lenses all have an impact on the way the subject looks to the viewer.

Although your D5000 may have come with a kit lens — the 18–55mm f/3.5–5.6G VR — one advantage to owning a digital SLR camera is the ability to change out lenses to fit the specific photographic style or scene that you want to capture. After a while, you may find that the kit lens doesn't meet your needs and you want to upgrade. Nikon dSLR owners have quite a few lenses from which to choose, all of which benefit from Nikon's expertise in the field of lens manufacturing.

One of the great things about photography is that through your lens choice, you can show things in a way that the human eye can't perceive. The human eye is basically a fixed focal-length lens. We can only see a certain set angular distance. This is called our field of view (or angle of view). ...