Back at the beginning of June, the Nikon D60 that had been a gift from my Dad before departing for Japan--the camera that had served me loyally for pretty much two years exactly--died on me.
Well. That's a bit dramatic. It suffered an unexpected failure, ceasing up in the middle of my town office's annual Hanami/Yaki Niku party, leaving me with only this as an indication of what, precisely, had gone wrong:
As I've previously detailed, I managed a quick, relatively painless fix for the issue, but the issue itself sent me off down a photographic rabbit hole. There was the purchase of the D7000, which I mentioned in that post,
...but, really, that was just the beginning of things. With two working cameras in hand, I decided to lend one to Heather as the girl's got an eye on her and she'd been lamenting her lack of picture taking of late. With it, I lent the 18-55mm kit lens that the camera came with (the widest lens I owned), leaving me with the 55-200mm lens that had also come with my camera, and my father's fantastically simple, manual-focus, 50mm f1.8.
However, with me and Mark and Mark and Lindsay planning to take another run at climbing Rishiri at the beginning of July, I reasoned that I'd be needing a wider lens than a 55mm (the 50mm is made for film cameras, so it winds up being something more than 55 on my cropped sensor) to capture all of those trees and rocks and shit. So, in a fit of loosely reasoned backwardsness, I decided to take advantage of cheap-o Japanaprices and purchase the Nikon 35mm f1.8 for which I'd been pining away for quite some time.
As lenses go, it's small, and fast, and sexy when it comes to low aperture/shallow depth of field, but, as any green photophile could tell you, it is not a wide lens! Sure, it's wider than a 55mm, but just barely. Though I had tried to justify the purchase to myself by claiming it was all for Rishiri, I soon realized that this lens would only be so good on the mountain.
So, what did I do to remedy this issue? Why, what any photographically insane person would do: I ordered ANOTHER lens online, some four days ahead of the date I was meant to take off for the mountain. This time it was a Tokina 11-16mm f2.8: a lens that no one could argue wasn't wide.
I'd been pining over the Nikon 10-24mm ever since I'd learned of its existence, and I'd snobbily refused to acknowledge any non-Nikon lenses. However, doing further research on Ken Rockwell's phenomenal site, I learned that, not only was the Tokina about $3-400 cheaper than the Nikon, it was more solidly constructed (in Japan, no less), and might even be argued to have better performance, despite its limited zoom range.
Despite the research backing my decision, buying the Tokina was still an impulse buy (and, really, so was the 35mm). I got lucky, and it arrived on the VERY AFTERNOON that I was shipping off to Rishiri, perfect timing to come along on our adventure with us.
And it was that adventure that obliterated any consumer guilt I may have had lingering around in my mind when it came to having bought the Tokina. It was wide. It was so wide. And whether I was shooting video or taking pictures with the D7000, the lens gave me ALL of the coverage that I wanted.
I was so caught up in how well the lens was working for me that I missed one of the key results of the purchase:
I'd assembled my lens system without even realizing it.
I stole that terminology from Ken, but it was something I'd kept in the back of my mind ever since he'd introduced me to the idea: a set of two or three lenses that would offer a wide range of coverage, making me ready for any photographic situation that should arise. When combined with the light, more-or-less compact Nikon 55-200mm (affectionately known as The Stalker Lens) that had come with with D60...
...I had me a complete system of lenses that covered from 11mm all the way up to 200mm. Sure, I was missing coverage from 17-34mm and 36-54mm, but by sacrificing that for the 35mm lens, I gained a super fast, wide aperture lens. And oh, what a lovely team they all made:
Technically speaking, that 11-200 range looks like this:
(Tokina at 11mm)
(Tokina at 16mm)
(Nikon fixed - 35mm)
(Nikon Telephoto at 55mm)
(Nikon Telephoto at 200mm)
But, artistically, they are capable of things like this:
and this:
and this:
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