{"id":22779,"date":"2006-01-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-16T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/2006\/01\/16\/nice-new-lens\/"},"modified":"2006-01-16T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-16T06:00:00","slug":"nice-new-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/2006\/01\/16\/nice-new-lens\/","title":{"rendered":"Nice New Lens"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

When I used to take photos with my film cameras, my favorite lens to use was the 28mm. When I switched to my digital SLR, I lost the wide-angle view that I loved, since the 7D has a crop factor of 1.5x. The widest lens I had was a 24mm, which worked out to be 36mm film equivalent, not wide enough to capture the landscapes and clouds that I like. So, I have been debating about which lens to buy next, and finally decided on the Konica-Minolta 18-70mm f\/3.5-5.6 “kit” lens. The quality is not the best, but it is a very useful range (27-105mm film equivalent), and the price is right, about $150 new.<\/p>\n

My timing was perfect, because I posted on dpreview.com about how my next lens purchase would be the kit lens, and added an off-the-cuff remark asking if anyone was getting rid of theirs. Well, someone replied that there was a lens for sale on dyxum.com (a site dedicated to the K-M dSLRs) for only $60! I immediately sent a message to the seller, and arranged to buy the lens. It arrived the following week, in perfect condition, and I have been enjoying it ever since. I now have the wide-angle view that I love, and I didn’t have to spend as much as I expected, even though the list price was cheap. The advantages of this lens are that it is a great range, the lens is very light, it focuses fast, and it uses 55mm filters, the same as my 70-210mm lens. And of course the price! The downsides to this lens are that the optical quality is not so great, and it has a plastic mounting ring. Both of these are really not that big a deal at all to me. 99% of my photos are resized for web viewing, and thus, sharpness is not critical. I don’t even shoot at the largest size in-camera. I think I pretty much found the perfect lens for my needs!<\/p>\n

Here are a couple pics taken from the same position to illustrate the useful wide-angle view:<\/p>\n

18mm:
\n\"Jan<\/a><\/p>\n

24mm:
\n\"Dec<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24mm:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Fk3x-5Vp","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.takoyaki.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}