Choosing A Lens.
 

Someone in Belgium posted these pictures on Wunderground. They show the results of different lens choices on the same scene. Might be helpful to someone other than myself, also.

and

jinx's good lens is 18-200. what do you mean 'choosing' a lens?

A nice illustration! FWIW 50mm is considered "normal" (i.e. neither wide angle nor telephoto) for 35mm cameras. (I'm not sure if there needs to be a reduction factor in there if you're talking digital SLRs, most of which have a different size sensor.)

If you wanted to buy another one, say. What size would be good to get? Depends on a lot of things. Also that lens you mention is a zoom lens and can take any length between 18 and 200. But some lenses are not zooms and have a single focal length--like the 50mm my old manual camera came with.

Lenses come in a wide variety of focal lengths LJ, specialized lenses for certain types of subjects such as wide angled lenses for landscape(~20mm and below), and telephoto (long ~300mm and above) for sports and the like.
Long story short, you can get some image distortion at the extremes of either end when using a zoom lens that has a wide range, like jinx's 18-200, but it depends on the lens.
So for me, I am looking to get a Nikon D50 and have two lenses, a 17-55 "walk around" lens, and a 75-300 telephoto for wildlife and sports and the like. What kind and what aperture range is her's if I might ask?

And to steve, yes there is a reduction factor due to the CCD being smaller than the 35mm negative. Example being: my 75-300mm lens will give me images that are like 105-450mm on a film camera.

her aperture? isn;t that a little personal?

1:3.5-6.3

Sorry, got a little excited there

Probably less helpful but shows the difference in background, of the same subject, with different lenses.

Also f-stop on the depth of field. Larger f-stop more stuff in focus.

It would have been interesting with this one if they had also listed the distance of the object from the camera. To keep the object the same size in the image at all those different focal lengths, they had to take the shot from really far away at the long focal length, and move in real close at the short focal length.

In my experience, using a smaller aperture (higher F-stop number) Produces a deeper depth of field. I like to focus on my main subject and have the rest in a blur. I use this technique for portrait and still life. For technical and documentation I will use a larger F-number for a larger depth of field.

My old Minolta X-700 35mm SLR, has served me for years.
I have a 50mm, 28-70mm zoom, and a 400mm Soligor telefoto.
But I use my HP digital more than any thing else.

I thought the same thing but no, he didn't say.

Very nice Bruce, thanks a lot!!