I Want a New Lens

After the few pictures I've taken with my new Nikon D610 (I can't say that enough for some reason), it seems like I'm always wanting a closer shot / more narrow field of view than my one full frame (FX in Nikonese) lens provides. Even when I shot a few pictures of my dogs in the motel room, maybe from only 5 feet away, I end up with the subject only filling up a quarter of the image or so. I want to be able to zoom in.

I was aware of this issue, which is caused by having a prime, or non-zoom, lens. In order to compose a shot with respect to filling up the frame, it requires physically moving the camera closer or farther away from the subject. A zoom lens allows you to adjust the lens to fill the frame as desired (within the limits of the zoom focal length).

The trade off is that primes are usually a sharper picture and usually have a wider aperture (my 50mm is f/1.8 where my widest zoom is only f/4). Because the focal length is fixed, a prime lens can be optimized for sharpness much better than a zoom. Sharpness, and picture quality, are what I want to optimize, so I have decided to try to use primes instead of zooms.

That said, I need something longer than a 50mm.

My plan is to get an 85mm. I think it will be sufficient. Using the Nikon lens simulator at:

http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/lens/simulator/

I can see that the 50mm provides about a 46 degree angle of view, whereas the 85mm is about 28 degrees. The 85mm is close to half as wide, about 44%. If my prior subjects were only filling up a quarter of the frame, or about 12 degrees, that same image would be filling up almost half of the 85mm frame. That's kind of what I'm hoping for.

My other thought regarding this size is that most of my landscape images with the D3200 were done using the 18-55mm zoom. With the 1.5 crop factor, if I shot at 55mm with that lens on that camera it would be equivalent to a 82.5mm lens on the D610. If I got an 85mm I'd be back to what I was used to with the D3200.

And that leads me to my final point.

I've read other blogs, etc., that mention it can take some getting used to both the bigger format camera (FX vs. DX for the D3200, etc.) as well as using a prime lens vs. a zoom lens. I believe it is true for me. So while I struggle trying to accept the wider images I'm capturing I've also gone back and looked at the images I took with the D3200 and I find that most of them were zoomed in more than the 33mm that equates to the 50mm on my D610. It's mainly because of that, of seeing what focal length I have normally been using, that I am ready to bite the bullet and get the 85mm.