Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Why I Love My 55-200mm Lens

I have two kit lenses for my Nikon: an 18-55mm AF-S, which I use most of the time, and a 55-200mm AF-S, which I generally reserve for the "Month Picture" photo sessions. The 55-200 can (potentially) take some amazing portraits, but the trouble with it is that a lot of distance is required between camera and subject, so it's harder to use when space is limited and/or I need some flexibility of positioning.

However, I had it on the camera for Michael's 12-month photos, and haven't gotten around to taking it off since.

It was still on when I got the urge to start snapping pictures of Michael being cute yesterday, and though the pictures themselves were not amazing, I was pleased to see that I managed to get some sharper images of Michael than I usually can with my smaller lens.
 
They were clear enough and cute enough that I imagined I could work some kind of blog post around them, so I began sorting through them to select and edit a few.




Then I came across this one, which Tom had taken without my knowledge.


Now, I'm no photographer, and certainly no certifiable photography critic, but I think it's quite stunning. Certainly, it took my breath away.

And then, embarrassingly, a bit of my confidence. After all, I'm the one who's (sort of) been practicing with the camera. Certainly, I'm much more familiar with it. And then Tom whips out a picture like this one?

But there's no doubt that I'm glad to have it, whoever was behind the lens. Definitely my favorite picture of Abby so far.

As for Michael, he took- not six- but seven steps today. It's still taking him some time to overcome his natural instinct to drop to a crawl once he's no longer supported, but he's making gradual progress, all the same.

Here's hoping I can keep up some sort of slow progression of my own with this photography thing. Some days, I feel like I'm still crawling, myself.