V1.02
Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
Page 376
This field of view change poses both positive and negative
issues for the D300 user:
• Lack of Wide Angle Ability—
physical constraints make it
difficult to build 35mm film lenses wider than 14mm
without introducing significant barrel distortion and other
problems. Indeed, to do so even at 14mm is difficult, and
involves costly aspherical lens elements to correct
chromatic aberration (where colors focus at different
points, a problem especially evident in corners of
uncorrected wide angle lenses). Thus, using a lens
originally intended for 35mm on a D300 limits you to an
angle of view of only about 91° diagonally, while 35mm
film users can easily obtain lenses that go as wide as 114°.
Fortunately, Nikon started building DX lenses, restoring
our wide angle abilities (at the cost of buying new lenses).
• Longer
reach
—Wildlife photographers in particular are
well known for sticking one or more teleconverters on
already long lenses to “pull in” the animal (I’ve watched
several mount both a 1.4x and 2.0x converter on a
500mm lens, resulting in an unwieldy and slow [f/11]
1400mm lens). Using a teleconverter not only makes the
effective aperture of a lens one or two stops smaller than
normal, but it also tends to decrease overall image
contrast and quality, especially in the corners. While the
smaller imaging area isn’t the same as having a
teleconverter, from a functional standpoint it’s a built-in
cropping that many 35mm photographers had to do
anyway.
