{"id":369,"date":"2009-01-14T12:54:36","date_gmt":"2009-01-14T17:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/?p=369"},"modified":"2009-01-14T13:20:45","modified_gmt":"2009-01-14T18:20:45","slug":"new-toy-uh-i-mean-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/2009\/01\/14\/new-toy-uh-i-mean-lens\/","title":{"rendered":"New Toy, uh I mean, Lens!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSCN5034\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My friend Alisa<\/a> decided recently to put her Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens up for sale. I was hesitant to make an offer for it because I didn’t really need it, but it sure would be nice to have. She made me a deal I couldn’t refuse and so now it has found a new home.<\/p>\n

When Nikon first announced this lens, everyone went crazy about it hoping it would be the “silver bullet” that would work for any occasion for DX cameras. Since then, the enthusiasm has tempered a little bit and there’s even been a little backlash, but at the end of the day, it’s a great lens for what it is made for. It’s clearly a “jack of all trades, master of none lens” that is perfect for those days that you want to go out and shoot pictures and not carry around a bag of lenses. Is it as wide as my 12-24mm Tokina lens? Nope. Is it as sharp or as bokeh-licious as my 50mm f\/1.8 lens? Nope. Does it zoom as far as my 70-300mm lens? Nope. Is it a low-light zooming monster like the 70-200mm f\/2.8 lens that I sometimes rent? Nope. <\/p>\n

What it will do is allow me to take shots I couldn’t before when I just want to take the camera out at a social occassion and not drag everything else along. It will get me every shot I want, be it up close or far away. The VR on the lens is pretty awesome too. I haven’t tried a direct comparision, but I’m sure it will outperform my 70-300mm lens at similar focal ranges for sharpness just by eliminating motion blur for my shaky little hands. I’m curious to see how slow I’ll be able to shoot with it where the VR can still compensate for the blur. <\/p>\n

So far, the only event I’ve gotten to use it for was the Chick-fil-A Bowl Parade.<\/a> You can click the link to see how some of the photos turned out. The other locations were shot with a variety of lenses, but the parade was exclusively with this lens. I’m really pleased with it as I was able to get a variety of shots at different focal lengths. The bokeh wasn’t really as terrible as everyone made it out to be, though I would certainly use a different lens if I was doing portrait shots. I did notice, however, the VR does use up the battery faster, but it wasn’t so much that I ran out while shooting.<\/p>\n

Overall, so far I’m really pleased with it, but I think I won’t really start to appreciate it until I’ve gone to a couple more parties and events and such and start to enjoy not bumping into everyone with my camera bag or having to stop and change lenses when everyone wants a closeup shot and I’ve got my telephoto lens mounted. That’s when the lens is really going to start paying off for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Alisa decided recently to put her Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens up for sale. I was hesitant to make an offer for it because I didn’t really need it, but it sure would be nice to have. She made … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":378,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions\/378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}