I recently bought some new camera gear, and now I’m thinking of selling a couple of my old lenses. One of them is a Sigma fish-eye lens (10-20mm f4/5.6 for Nikon DX) that I use for extreme wide-angle photos. It’s a trick lens, and while some of the images are interesting, I never really used it as much as I hoped to.
The other lens, however, is the original Nikon DX super-zoom (AF-S 18-200mm f3.5/5.6 VR). It’s not a high-end pro lens, especially in low light, but it has a very versatile focal range. Under most common conditions it replaces a whole bagful of interchangeable lenses. I used it all the time.
It’s amazing how we can become attached to things. I’m not talking about the kind of attachment that leads to gaudy levels of conspicuous consumption. I mean the way we become attached to the useful objects in our lives.
Probably the most common example we are likely to share is our first car. Mine was a Plymouth Volaré, a car that so spectacularly failed to live up to expectations that its production caused the downfall of Chrysler Corporation in the 1970s and ultimately helped destroy the reputation of the entire American auto industry. It was not a fun car to drive or maintain, but it was my car. It gave me freedom and control that I had never had before. I never loved it, but I have fond memories of the places I went and the things that I did and the people who road with me. I felt bad about getting rid of that car.
I felt the same way about the first computer I ever learned to use, a VAX 11/780 at college. I eventually got the job of running it for the school, and it became my job to sell it when we upgraded to newer computers. I remember when it was waiting to ship out — 4 or 5 refrigerator-sized racks of electronics standing in the hallway — and I remember feeling like a piece of my life was going with it.
I’m feeling that way now about that 18-200 street zoom. I own a few other lenses, but I don’t use them nearly as much as I used that lens. Almost every photo I shot with my D200 was through that lens — maybe 35,000 images altogether. I carried that lens everywhere, and I used it to do cool things. It’s not a feeling I’ll ever quite experience again.
Why are you selling the lens you like but keeping lenses you presumably like less?
Hi Jim!
Short answer: I’m replacing it with a better one.
Long answer:
My old camera body had Nikon’s smaller DX sensor, but now I’m switching to Nikon’s larger FX sensor. The lenses I’m selling are DX lenses, so they don’t create an image large enough to fill the FX sensor on the new camera. The camera can detect that and only capture the portion of the sensor that has an image, but that defeats the purpose of moving to the larger sensor.
The lenses I’m keeping are specialized lenses that have always formed a larger FX-sized image — which worked just fine on the smaller DX-sized sensor — so they work with the new camera. I’ve also purchased a few new FX lenses, including a new street zoom to replace the one I’m selling.
Makes perfect sense. I learned about the cropping of legacy DSLR lenses, and associated effects on effective focal length with DSLR bodies, the hard way (after I bought the camera). I recently bought a Canon 6D for my daughter to address. Alas, I still have a Nikon D90 and suffer from the focal length effects with my father’s old F serier lenses. Someday I will get a full frame camera.
I have conflicted feelings about it. By going full frame, I should get better images, but I’m committing myself to larger optics, meaning I end up carrying around a lot of tubes filled with expensive pieces of heavy glass. My combination laptop/camera pack weighs about 23 pounds, and it might be worth more than my car.