Nikon D7000 manual Working with Lenses, Sensor Sensibilities

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Working with Lenses

If Nikon has one advantage over many of the other vendors of digital SLRs (other than making great, affordable cameras), it’s the mind-bending assortment of high-quality lenses available to enhance the capabilities of cameras like the Nikon D7000. You can use thousands of current and older lenses introduced by Nikon and third-party vendors since 1959 (although lenses made before 1977 may need an inexpensive modification). These can give you a wider view, bring distant subjects closer, let you focus closer, shoot under lower light conditions, or provide a more detailed, sharper image for critical work. Other than the sensor itself, the lens you choose for your dSLR is the most important component in determining image quality and perspective of your images.

This chapter explains how to select the best lenses for the kinds of photography you want to do.

Sensor Sensibilities

From time to time you’ve heard the term crop factor, and you’ve probably also heard the term lens multiplier factor. Both are misleading and inaccurate terms used to describe the same phenomenon: the fact that cameras like the D7000 (and most other afford- able digital SLRs) provide a field of view that’s smaller and narrower than that produced by certain other (usually much more expensive) cameras, when fitted with exactly the same lens.

Figure 11.1 quite clearly shows the phenomenon at work. The outer rectangle, marked 1X, shows the field of view you might expect with a 28mm lens mounted on one of Nikon’s “full-frame” (non-cropped) cameras, like the Nikon D700, D3s, or D3x. The area marked 1.5X shows the field of view you’d get with that 28mm lens installed on a