A while back, I wrote that I would adopt a commonsense approach to my photography by opting to use just one camera and one lens, the idea being that restricting my gear would reduce my tendency to procrastinate about my photography.
Well, the “one camera, one lens” approach lasted just a little over three months, as yesterday I received a new 18-55mm kit lens for my D7500. So now it’s one camera two lenses..
I know what you are probably thinking – GAS has kicked in. In fact, that is not the case at all, and my decision to invest in a second lens was based on logic.
I had a handful of 58mm filters left over from my earlier Lumix days. To use them with my 18-140 lens would have required a 67mm to 58mm step-down ring, but that would have resulted in vignetting; and to replace them with 67mm filters would have been quite an expensive exercise.
So the alternative I decided on was to buy a lens with a filter thread smaller than 58mm, and use a step-up ring. This led me to the basic Nikon 18-55mm kit lens, which has a 52mm filter thread. That lens, along with a 52mm to 58mm step-up ring, turned out to be cheaper than buying a full set of new 67mm filters.
Well, at least the reasoning behind my decision worked for me! Hence it’s now one camera two lenses.
I’m sure some of you will be thinking – why buy a basic kit lens?
That’s easy to answer:
- it is compatible with my D7500;
- it is relatively inexpensive;
- it is light and compact;
- it has VR – vibration reduction – supposedly good for 4-stops, and
- I had been impressed by the 18-55mm kit lens I used years ago on my D5100.
Having only received the lens the day before yesterday, I haven’t had much of an opportunity to give it a real test run, and the few images I did manage to grab, I captured only in JPEG format. I’m not sure how I managed to turn the RAW option off in the camera.
So – here we go – just a small handful of JPEGs shot at random in a quick 10-minute walk.
Apart from optical corrections and cropping to size applied in DxO Photolab 8, these are SOOC.
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This final image was shot in RAW – on the spur of the moment, as road workers continued into the night outside my home.
And incidentally, the featured image at the top of this story was shot on a non-VR version of the 28.55mm lens, which was sent in error…oops! (Just had to quickly try it out)