Nikon D5300 For Dummies
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To decide which lens is the best partner for your Nikon D5300 camera, you start by considering these factors for choosing a dSLR camera lens:

  • Lens compatibility: You can mount a wide range of lenses on your Nikon D5300 camera, but some lenses aren’t fully compatible with all camera features. For example, with some lenses, you can’t take advantage of autofocusing and must focus manually. Your camera manual lists all the lens types that can be mounted on the camera and explains what features are supported with each type.

  • Focal length and the crop factor: The focal length of a lens, stated in millimeters, determines the angle of view that the camera can capture and the spatial relationship of objects in the frame. Focal length also affects depth of field, or the distance over which focus appears acceptably sharp.

    You can loosely categorize lenses by focal length as follows:

    • Wide-angle: Lenses with short focal lengths — generally, anything under 35mm — are known as wide-angle lenses. A wide-angle lens has the visual effect of pushing the subject away from you and making it appear smaller. As a result, you can fit more of the scene into the frame without moving back. Additionally, a wide-angle lens has a large depth of field, which means that both the subject and background objects appear sharp. These characteristics make wide-angle lenses ideal for landscape photography.

    • Telephoto: Lenses with focal lengths longer than about 70mm are telephoto lenses. These lenses create the illusion of bringing the subject closer to you, increase the subject’s size in the frame, and produce a short depth of field so that the subject is sharply focused but distant objects are blurry. Telephoto lenses are great for capturing wildlife and other subjects that don’t permit up-close shooting.

    • Normal: A focal length in the neighborhood of 35mm to 70mm is considered “normal” — that is, somewhere between a wide-angle and telephoto. This focal length produces the angle of view and depth of field that are appropriate for the kinds of snapshots that most people take.

    Note, however, that the focal lengths stated here are 35mm equivalent focal lengths. Here’s the deal: For reasons that aren’t really important, when you put a standard lens on most digital cameras, including your Nikon D5300 camera, the available frame area is reduced, as if you took a picture on a camera that uses 35mm film negatives and then cropped it. This crop factor varies depending on the camera, which is why the photo industry adopted the 35mm-equivalent measuring stick as a standard.

    With the D5300, the crop factor is 1.5. So you multiply the crop factor by the lens focal length to get the actual angle of view. When shopping for a lens, it's important to remember this crop factor to make sure that you get the focal length designed for the type of pictures you want to take.

    Not sure which focal length to choose? Here's a really cool online tool to help you understand the subject more: Point your web browser to Nikon Imaging, click the link for Nikkor lenses, and then click the link for the Nikkor Lenses Simulator. Using this interactive tool, you can see exactly how different lenses capture the same scene.

  • Prime versus zoom lenses: A prime lens is a single focal-length lens. With a zoom lens, you get a range of focal lengths in one unit. Why select a lens that offers a single focal length when a zoom lens offers a range of focal lengths? In a word, quality.

    Because of some lens science, you typically see some reduction in picture quality at certain points in the range of a zoom lens. On the flip side, a zoom lens is certainly more convenient than carting around a bag of prime lenses with different focal lengths. And you can get exceptional image quality from many zoom lenses, even with some super zooms, which offer a huge range of focal lengths.

  • Aperture range: The aperture is an adjustable diaphragm in a lens. By adjusting the aperture size, you control the amount of light that enters through the lens and strikes the image sensor, thereby controlling exposure. The aperture setting also affects depth of field: A wide-open aperture produces a short depth of field, so the subject is sharply focused, but distant objects appear blurry; a narrow aperture produces a long depth of field so that both the subject and distant objects appear sharp.

    For the purposes of lens shopping, for your Nikon D5300 or any other dSLR camera, you need to know just a few things.

    • Every lens has a specific range of aperture settings. Obviously, the larger that range, the more control you have over exposure and depth of field.

    • The larger the maximum aperture, the “faster” the lens. Aperture settings are stated in f-stops, with a lower number meaning a larger aperture. For example, a setting of f/2 results in a more open aperture than f/4. And if you have one lens with a maximum aperture of f/2 and another with a maximum aperture of f/4, the f/2 lens is said to be faster because you can open the aperture wider, thereby allowing more light into the camera and permitting the image to be captured in less time.

      This not only benefits you in low-light situations but also when photographing action, which requires a fast shutter speed (short exposure time). So, all other things being equal, a faster lens is better.

    • With some zoom lenses, the maximum and minimum aperture change as you zoom the lens. For example, when you zoom to a telephoto focal length, the maximum aperture generally gets smaller — that is, you can't open the aperture as much as you can at a wide-angle setting. You can buy lenses that maintain the same maximum and minimum aperture throughout the whole zoom lens, but you pay more for this feature.

After studying these issues and narrowing down your choices, finding the right lens in the category you want is just a matter of doing some homework. Study lens reviews in photography magazines and online photography sites to find the best performing lens in your price range.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Julie Adair King is a veteran photographer, author, and teacher. She is the author of several For Dummies books about Nikon and Canon dSLR cameras, with sales totaling more than 400,000 copies. She is also the bestselling author of all editions of Digital Photography For Dummies.

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