pinglee

Hi all,
My wife and I will be going to Paris, Nice, and Tuscany (ie Florence and surrounding areas) in June. I have Nikon D5100 and 2 lenses for it. One is 18-55 mm and the second is 55-300mm. I have a travel bag for the camera and it will only fit one lens. I am trying to decide which lens is better to bring.

The short lens will be good for the landscape shots but the telephoto one will be good for when i want a good shot of say stained glass in Notre Dame. I am leaning towards the telephoto lens and hoping to be far enough away in some cases where i can still take good landscape pictures.

What do you all think?

zoecat

I have to ask the obvious question- why not buy a bag that fits both lenses?

I'd take the 18-55mm.

zatrams999

Pinglee, sounds like that's going to be a great trip!

Wondering if renting a lens is an option? If so,
I would suggest the 16-85mm as a one lens solution. I have used this for trips, it is a terrific lens.

In addition, a low-light lens would be helpful too...so maybe consider the 35mm f1.8.

Another suggestion: you may also want to post on photo.net and get some input from the experts there.

Aduchamp1

Whatever you take you will be both right and wrong. There will shots for which the lens will be perfect and others not. Usually 55-300 are too heavy or too slow.

Myer

Unless you feel like carrying two lenses take the 18-55.

You'll take 99% with that.

I hear people say they're going on atrip and need a longer lens. Unless you're going for wildlife you want wide.

When you back back and review your photos you'll tell yourself they just don't look like what you saw.

That's because you eyes will see wider than your lens.
Wide, wide, wide.

hetismij2

Ideally buy a bag which will take both. Or carry the camera and long lens in the bag and the 18-55 in your pocket.
Most of the time you will use the wider lens though.

If you really are only taking one then take the 18-55. It is light and small and wide enough for both architecture and landscapes.

Actually 18mm is a lot wider than your eyes see. A 50mm lens used to be the standard to give approximately a human field of view, but with modern APS-C digitals you need about a 35mm lens.

china_cat

I'm with Myer...take the 18-55. I'm not familiar with Nikon models, is the D5100 a crop sensor? if so, the 55mm end of your zoom lens is definitely too long for city pictures. You won't be able to get both of the towers of Notre Dame, for example, unless you are quite far away. Inside museums if you want to shoot something, you'll have to be across the room from it, and then people will walk in front of you.

I generally travel with a 28-135 as an all purpose lens, and a 10-22 for wide angle stuff. I leave the 70-300 at home unless I'm going to shoot wildlife.

or as others have said...buy a bag which fits both. I mean, why have a lovely DSLR with the ability to switch lenses to suit your needs, and then not carry any lenses?

greg

I prefer faster and wider angle lens. In many places, you just cannot step back far enough to take picture of monuments, architectures, etc. They tend to be in tight squares or located on a narrow street.

A faster lens with an ability to take pictures without flash is a big plus inside many buildings.

If I want to take a telephoto "like" picture, I can "simulate" to some extent by cranking up the resolution and cropping and blowing up the pictures afterwards. It is harder to simulate what a wide angle can do with a telephoto.

jent103

Another vote for the 18-55. I use a 17-85 when I travel and it's great in the vast majority of situations (with limitations in low light, etc). I was with my brother on my last trip. He hauled around his telephoto but I don't think he ever used it.

Myer

The D1500 is a crop sensor approximately like the Canon crop. (Canon 1.6, Nikon 1.5)

That means it would be 28mm on a 35mm camera.

It's difficult to compare your lens to your eyes because your eyes move around and you can easily feel that your angle of view is over 90 degrees.

I have a Canon T2i (crop sensor) and an excellent 15-85 lens. This is great for travel and is 20% wider than the 18-55.

Other than when wildlife is involved that's the only lens I take on trips.

greg,
We all want faster (boy is that misleading!!!) don't we. We always want a larger (smaller number) apearture but life doesn't always give us what we want.

Take the 18-55 and have a good time.

When you come back download a free program from www.download.com called ExposurePlot. It will analyze all of the images in a folder. If you took a large percentage of your photos at the longest end then you could have used a longer lens. My guess is you'll be somewhere between the middle and wide end.

Andrew

Take the 18-55mm for sure. This thing takes 16 Megapixel images - you can always crop later for stained glass, etc. if 55mm is not close enough in. You can't "uncrop" to zoom out later, though.

Michael

Figure out a way of taking both lenses.

nancythenice

I recently looked at the focal lengths I used most often in taking photos during a trip to Italy 3 years ago. I wanted to figure out what focal lengths I actually shot at as part of deciding on a new lens purchase. For that trip, I had an 18-70 lens on a DX body, and carried a 70-300. I think I changed lenses only twice in the entire three week trip. It was just too much trouble. In fact often I didn't even take the long lens out for the day, leaving it in the hotel to decrease the weight I had to lug around. In looking back at the photos, I found that I shot at 18mm, or close to it, about 70% of the time. The rest were shot at about 65-70mm. For the few shots in which I was trying to get something really far away - like the next hill town in Tuscany, I was able to crop as mentioned above. So I think the 18-55 is the way to go, if you only take one lens. On my upcoming trip to London and the Netherlands, I am going to take a 10-20mm lens, to use on the tulip fields, but my new 18-270 will be on the Nikon most of the time.

Andrew

Yeah, I use my 24-105mm about 80% of the time when I travel. (I have a full frame DSLR though - so 24mm is even wider for me than 18mm for cropped DSLRs.) However, on my last trip in September I was glad to use my 70-200mm (with a 1.4x extender) occasionally when needed, to get some shots I might otherwise have not gotten even with cropping. (Sometimes I still had to crop severely.) I used my wide lens 17-40mm the least but again, when I wanted it, it was still nice to have. I carry a lot of extra weight when I travel but I'm willing to sacrifice for a few extra shots I might otherwise not get.

ribeirasacra

For me the whole point of using a DSLR is the lenses. So purchase a bag which can guard them all, plus a decent flash gun and maybe some filters.

Myer

Two years ago we were in Tuscany. All I had with me is my 15-85 lens. I just went back to my photos and ran some statistics.

22% were taken at 85mm
75% were taken between 15 and 40mm.
7% were taken at 85mm.
13% were taken greater than 55mm (60 - 85).

At 16 megapixels you can always crop a little if you have to.

greenerpastures

The main reason for purchasing a digital SLR instead of a compact camera is for the larger size image sensor, which gives a cleaner image, and more noticeable the higher the ISO setting you use; Andrew will attest to this considering he owns a camera with a full frame sensor.
Definitely take the 18-55mm, which is equivalent to a 27-83mm on a 35mm camera (standard print format)
When traveling I take two lenses, the wide angle only going to the full frame equivalent of 64mm. If I owned a lens that went to the equivalent of 83mm , I am guessing this would cover more than 80% of my shots. Think of the 18-55mm lens as a good walk around lens.
With regards to your last comment about getting far away enough
1) I guarantee you there will be lots of pictures you will not be able to take with the 55-300; a picture of a bakery in Paris from across the street for example, even Notre Dame could be a struggle at 55mm.
2) Normal perspective for a lens on your camera is about 30-35mm, meaning the image is roughly what you see, not compressed or expanded through the use of ranges either side of this( type in normal lens perspective in google for more info). If you take the 55-300, all your images will have some compression, mostly at the long end(300mm).
3) The longer focal length you use, the faster the shutter speed you will require to maintain a steady lens, and therefore a sharp image. You can up the iso setting to up the shutter speed, but at the loss of image quality.
I hope this is of assistance

pinglee

hi all,

Wow thanks for the overwhelming response. Looks like the consensus is the 18-55. As to why I do not take both lenses, the reason is because I am trying to keep the weight down. I already have a bunch of stuff i probably need to carry in my backpack so i do not want to walk around all day with 2 lenses.

bigtyke

My son took both on our trip in Dec. He used the shorter lens almost exclusively

flygirl

I know I'm late to the party, but here are my thoughts anyway:

I'm not convinced taking both lenses will make much of a difference unless you plan to carry both around with you all the time. You never know what shot will come up as you are wandering around. I'd go with a lens that at minimum includes what the normal eye sees (for a crop sensor, that would be 35mm). I like the idea of the 16-85.

It's too bad Nikon doesn't have a good zoom that covers a wider useful range. I love (love) my Canon 24-105 F4L. L lenses are top of the Canon line and what a great useful range. "Wide enough" to "telephoto enough".

What I used to do, when my main lens was the Canon 35mm F1.4L, was to always carry my P&S with me as well as the dSLR. The normal setting on a typical P&S is pretty wide straight out of the box, no fiddling required (I think my various Canon P&S, for instance, are around 18mm at the wide end). If I really wanted to "get it all in" I'd just pull out the P&S for that particular shot.

What I eventually found, though, is that all the shots I really ended up liking were the closeups. The wide ones I take tend to be documentary for the most part (gotta get the whole church!) or shots of friends/family (say cheese and lift your drinks for the camera!). Documentary ones I don't usually bother sharing except with the people who were on the trip with me.