Nikon® D700 Digital Field Guide

Chapter 4. Selecting and Using Lenses

In This Chapter

Wide-angle and ultrawide lenses

Mid-range or standard zoom lenses

Telephoto lenses

Special purpose lenses

Using VR lenses

Using DX lenses

Third-party lenses

Lens accessories

The lens that you put on your camera is almost as important as the camera body itself, and 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.

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 will have problems such as softness, lack of contrast, chromatic aberration, and vignetting (darkening of the edges). Chromatic aberration is characterized by fringing on the edges of certain areas of the image, particularly in areas of high contrast. This is caused by the inability of the lens to focus all wavelengths of light on the same optical axis. In order to take full advantage of your D700, I recommend buying the best lenses that you can afford.

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 ...