Lens Advise

[love2click]

Hello there!I am a Nikon 3100 owner and love it. I have had the camera for about a year and have used it primarily to shoot images of my daughter and family. I also enjoy shooting outdoor scenes. I have been getting along with the standard lens that comes with the camera, but want to expand. Does anyone have any suggestions on which Nikon lens will provide the most range of use? I would love to have one lens that can shoot close up and far away with the most detail possible. I find that the standard lens has a small range and I tend to miss a lot of shots b/c I am have to get up and move to bring the photo into an acceptable frame. You can imagine I am doing a lot of moving around while trying to keep up with a 2 year old!Any suggestions are appreciated. Looking forward to learning more from this wonderful site!

 

[tirediron]

First off, what is your budget; you can spend $100 on a lens or $15,000. It sounds to me like you are probably after a "super-zoom" such as Nikon's 18-200 or the Sigma 18-300. These lenses give you everything from moderately wide to super-telephoto in one moderately priced package running from ~$500 (used) to $750 (new). The catch is (there's always a catch isn't there?) that any time you ask a tool to perform too many functions, there have to be compromises. With all of these lenses, there are two main compromises: One is that there image quality, especially at each end of the range suffers from distortion and chromatic aberration. The other is that they are relatively slow lenses, with maximum apertures of around 5.6 at their longest zoom length.

If all you want is one lens, for snapshots and the occasional "pretty" picture, these will work well enough, but you really are missing the point of being able to change lenses on a DSLR. I would suggest a two-lens package consisting of the Nikon 18-70, which can be had used for as little as $200, and the 70-300 f4 which can be found used for $500 or so. This will give you a good shooting range using decent quality glass with only one lens change and at a fairly moderate price point.