Nikon® D90 Digital Field Guide

Chapter 4. Selecting and Using Lenses for the Nikon D90

In This Chapter

Lens compatibility

Wide-angle and ultrawide-angle lenses

Midrange zoom lenses

Telephoto lenses

Special-purpose lenses

Using Vibration Reduction lenses

The lens that you put on your camera is almost as important as the camera body itself. Some may argue that the lens is more important than the camera itself. 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 your image to be perceived. For example, using an ultrawide-angle lens to add some apparent perspective distortion to make your image seem more expansive. Shooting the same scene with a normal or short telephoto lens won't yield such drastic results.

In order to take full advantage of your D90, I recommend buying the best lenses that you can afford. The build and optical quality of a lens can have a serious impact on your image quality. Lower-quality lenses often have undesirable characteristics that will show up in your images. Often, low-priced lenses have problems, such as softness, lack of contrast, chromatic aberration (CA), and vignetting (darkening of the edges). Chromatic aberration is characterized by colored fringing on the edges of certain areas of the image, particularly in the corners and especially in areas of high contrast. This is caused by the inability of the lens to focus all wavelengths of light on the same optical ...