[Mr Guy]

Well, generally speaking, there's three basic schools of thought that I've noticed on how to build your lens collection. All three are built around slightly different ways of learning, and involve more or less artificially restricting yourself in order to identify your real needs. For example, if you spend too much money too quickly, you may end up with a bunch of lenses that do what you want only sorta well, and never really learn what makes one better than another, so the idea is to impose restrictions that eventually help you finish the following statement:

Dang it, I keep finding that I need a lens that can _________________________.

You don't want to buy a lens EVERY time you run into a restriction, because if you're really serious about learning, you want to know how to overcome some of those restrictions in different creative ways. Those limitations can be excellent teachers, until you keep running into the same limitations that drive you nuts and eventually prompt a lens purchase.


The three main recommendations I generally see are in one of these categories:

1. Just get the kit lens. It's cheap, it's flexible, and it has well known limitations. Eventually, once you see the pattern emerge in your shooting, you should have a good grasp of what you want to accomplish.

2. Get a nifty fifty, ie a relatively inexpensive prime lens. While it's not flexible in terms of zoom, fast prime lenses are extremely versatile for lighting conditions and encourage you to really think about composition. The 50mm is the one people recommend because they used to be the standard walk around lens that came with film SLR. Now, 50mm is more of a portrait length on crop body cameras, which doesn't diminish their appeal. Plus, they are still cheap (on Nikon, the kind with an autofocus motor is more expensive, so you need to know whether your body requires that to autofocus). Once you get hooked on primes you'll find you want more and more of them, rather than one really nice zoom.

3. Get a very flexible all in one super zoom, and then one really good lens that is specific for what you already know you want to do. That's something like an 18mm-200mm zoom along side a very high quality wide angle or macro for those landscapes and macro work you talked about, whichever you think you'll do more of. That lets you see for yourself the difference in lens quality, and decide what's really worth it to you.


I also, by the way, highly recommend renting expensive lenses before buying them. Spending a hundred bucks to rent a lens for a week is cheap compared to regretting a thousand dollar decision.