Travel Gadget – Nikkor 55-200mm f4-5.6 Lens

What are the lenses I normally bring along for travel? Readers following me on Travel Feeder should know that I love to have my favourite Nikkor 35mm f1.8 fast lens fitted on my D60 whenever I go travel. It gives me full flexibilities to shoot whatever scene under whatever ambient light, especially under low light conditions where fast lens is a must. However, for capturing full impact landscape photos, I would also bring along my Nikkor 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 lens. It allows me to capture reasonably wide angle of the scene when zoom it out to the widest view angle of 18mm (or 35mm film size equivalent of 27mm).

In fact, other than these 2 lenses, I have another lens which I lock it in my cupboard most of the time. I seldom bring it along on travel nor fit it to my DSLR, unless I go to the local gardens to shoot flowers. Which lens is it? Bingo! The Nikkor 55-200mm f4-5.6 ED lens. (”oh C’mon… it’s already stated in your title man! “)

Why I rarely use it? It’s comparatively small aperture limits its usage under many conditions of lighting. Unless there is sufficient natural sunlights or shooting a flash gun, this slow lens is not suitable to shoot people in actions or sports. As a rule of thumbs, I need shutter speed of at least 1/200s to avoid hand shake or blurry photo when shooting this lens at 200mm tele end. Of course, you still could crank up the ISO of your camera to 1600 or above and still able to have clean shot, if you are using D700 or D3 full frame camera.

However, if proper lighting given to the scene, this Nikkor 55-200mm could still be a stunner. Especially when shooting portrait or isolating objects, it can poduce super crisp photos with full impact and none distracted smooth creamy out-of-focus background. And I almost missed it until one day when I grabbed it over to the pool side and started taking some inspiring shots of my daughter, Chloe (see photo above). The above photo was shot with 1/200sec shutter speed, f4.8 Aperture and focal length of 105mm. Focal length of 105mm is ideal for or sometimes considered as portrait lens. In order to freeze Chloe’s motion, I set the sensor sensibility higher to ISO400 so I could shoot it with 1/200 seconds Shutter speed. What ’s the result? A crisp and clean Chloe’s headshot with swimming pool background thrown out of focus completely. Isn’t it great for portrait? – Travel Feeder.