best value telephoto lens for Nikon d5500?

[Cage]

Congrats on the purchase. Looking forward to seeing some photos.

[Ilovebokeh]

Congrats on the purchase. Looking forward to seeing some photos.

Pressure is on.

This is my only photo on the site so far - feel free to constructively critique.

I only had my Nikon kit lens. I would have loved to blur the background and just make the tree the subject. The composition is tough though as I don't know how to 'crop' the image for maximum effect (I know how, but not what.) Eg. Should I have just taken the roots? one root? Just the trunk? Cut the leaves? Angles? etc?

http://www.ausphotography.net.au/for...98#post1426198

[arthurking83]

.... The composition is tough though as I don't know how to 'crop' the image for maximum effect (I know how, but not what.) Eg. Should I have just taken the roots? one root? Just the trunk? Cut the leaves? Angles? etc?...

composition is hard. '
it's hard to learn, and hard to teach. It just comes from within(I think) it's what you want to convey to the world. I don't think anyone can teach you a composition style. You discover it as you explore photography with every exposure .. good and bad. Don't just delete the bad ones too tho.
I use mine to learn what not to do again. I do eventually delete them, but after a bit of a clean up at the start of a new year.
I store my images on a yearly basis and then using other directory structures .. but the main directory heading is year.
At the start of every new year(or thereabouts) I sift back through them all. I look at them, rate any that I havent' rated, try to keyword them, and basically manage them.
I then filter them by rating. All the below par(deletable) images are then Shift-deleted.

What you wanted to achieve in that image can be done, but it needs work, or $s.
The other alternative, I don't like to use, is pseudo photographic processing. ie. shopping in some gaussian blur into the background.

some ways to possibly get some blur in that image:
1. get an ultra ultra wide lens.
technical point. Shorter focal lengths make it harder to get shallow DOF .. unless you're using large formats. And full frame is usually not large enough. Problem is, UWA lenses for larger formats are impossible to find.
Say you had a 14mm lens on a full frame camera, and it had a f/2.8 aperture to boot. You'd get really close to the root system, focus a bit closer than the focus point you really wanted and shot wide open at f/2.8.
A similar lens to consider would be the Tokina 11-16/2.8 which is an APS-C lens. I've had the chance to play with an old model a long time ago and it's a good lens .. definitely worth the money. And don't let anyone tell 'ya that f/2.8 on an UWA lens is wasted .. it ain't. Just learn how to use it well.

You can even do that9blur) with your 18-55 lens to a point. Just that the equiv 28mm FOV is far from what you get from an UWA lens.

2. use a stitched panorama method.
Once again with your 18-55 lens, because it's FOV is much more narrow than an UWA lens, you shoot a series of images in row across and a column down, and you have a set of image that can be stitched together to make an UWA simulated image.
You will get massive distortions if you stand in the one spot and rotate around a single point. but they can also be dealt with too. Keep aperture wide open, and focus close up as you can.
The trick is to do this pano, with the lens focused closely on some subject matter, and when you move the camera to capture the rest of the image for that wide FOV scenery .. you mustn't allow the camera to refocus for the other images. That is, the peripheral stitch images should be out of focus, to give that bokeh look.

3. Do as you did before, and use the previously mentioned Gaussian blur method in Ps. You can paint it in as you need, but it's hard to do 'just right'.