Camera / Lens opinion...

[bthomson82]

Just acquired a Nikon D80 with a 28 - 100 lens. I'm a complete newbie to photography, bought it for decent holiday snaps mainly. What is this lens good for (if anything!) I take it that because it's just a kit lens it will be bog standard?

Cheers

[DogHeadGod]

The lens zooms from wide angle (28mm), this will let you fit a lot of scenery into your photo, to telephoto (100mm) which will let you zoom in closer to something you may not physically be able to get closer to. It should suit you quite well for some decent holiday snaps. 50mm is roughly what the human eye sees in terms to field of view and 'zoom'.

The best thing to do is get out and use it before you go away so you get a feel for it and all the settings. I would recommend keeping the camera on auto mode when you are away as without practise you may make some errors in the other modes and lose some snaps.

Welcome to the forum


--edited for a bit more clarity on what the lens does.

[inkista]

If you want to learn the basics of lenses, I'd recommend taking a look at this SLR lens primer. It defines the basic terms used in describing a lens, such as focal length and maximum aperture, prime vs. zoom, etc. and what they boil down to in terms of use.