Hey guys
Haven't been in this thread for a while!
Can someone advise me on a lens? I have a Nikon D3200 with just the standard kit lens.
Now I'm more familiar with my camera, I'm starting to find it's not versatile enough - mainly in terms of the zoom. I don't particularly want to upgrade but I am toying with the idea.
Should I just buy a zoom lens for it? (Any advice on which ones?)
Or bite the bullet and buy something more up to date? I'd be prepared to spend maybe £600 on a new camera but I'm not sure I'd spend that much on a lens for a camera I am thinking about changing.
Could I upgrade the camera with a zoom lens for £600?
Prepared to spend £300-400 on lens' though.
Any help would be so much appreciated!
The basic limitations of a kit lens are:
Image quality - that's something people like to talk about, but it can mean different things to different people. Most common problems with quality are sharpness, chromatic aberration, distortion and colour fidelity.
Zoom range - the average kit lens goes from about 18mm to about 70mm. Great for portraits and family photos, less so for sports, wildlife, landscapes.
Maximum aperture - kit lenses tend not to open all that wide, so low-light and tight selective focus with a narrow depth of field is harder to achieve.
Most modern kit lenses are actually pretty good, though. And the improved image quality of a more expensive lens is unlikely to make a huge difference to your photos in itself.
The question really is what is it that you want to be able to do, that you can't do with what you have.
If it's really just the zoom (as in, you can't zoom in close enough to stuff) then you can get cheap super-zooms up to 300mm without breaking the bank. These are basically like kit lenses but with a longer reach, and are often sold as extended kits. You can get a Tamron 70-300m for under £100, for instance, or Nikon's own 55-300mm for £200.
Once you start down that road, you quickly get locked into a system, of course, and then you'll probably want to stay with it or you need to replace all your lenses, but you should be safe enough with Nikon. They aren't going anywhere, and you'll be able to use any Nikon lens you buy on other Nikon bodies if you upgrade in the future.
As a rule of thumb, you should aim to spend more on lenses than you do on cameras. They last longer, for one thing. Unless there's a particular feature set on a new body that you know would massively improve your photography, or your camera breaks down, there's no real need to upgrade it.
