Best walk-around lens for d7100?
Ill try to describe best what i'm looking for in a lens and see if any of you have any recommendations. I'm buying the nikon d7100 body only and need a lens that's better than the kit. Ill be taking photography school and hopefully making a career out of it so id rather have a better lens right off the bat than the kit lens which will potentially only last me a little while.Id prefer a zoom, all in one lens but the quality of multiple lenses seems to be too appealing to me. Point being, i'm looking for a walk around lens that doesn't have a huge zoom but does great from a small range. A lens that i can do everything with for the most part, Portraits, landscapes, flowers. Maybe there's no such lens and i'm grasping for a needle in a hay stack. My limits for a lens is $800 not a penny more. I was previously looking at 16-85VR but not sure if that's a good lens or not. Any recommendations are great. -thanks in advance.
The best walk-around Nikon lens is probably the 24-70 f2.8, but that is significantly out of your price range. My suggestion would be to look for a used 28-70 f2.8, which should be able to be found around $800. Honestly, that's what I do almost all of my shooting with.
A significantly cheaper solution would be the 50mm f.1.4.It's the most lens you can get for the money, hands down. Very fast, very sharp, but the only downside is it's a prime. However, the best zoom money can buy are your feet.
Good glass is expensive, so be prepared to pay for it. With that said, your kit 18-105 is pretty great as far as kit lenses go.
Many find that the Nikkor AF-S 18-200 mm zoom to be the best single lens solution in most cases.
Buying a 50 mm lens will require you to move away from to toward your subject to frame it properly in your cameras viewfinder. It is really a medium telephoto lens used mostly for shooting portraits
People use prime lenses for very good reasons apart from price.
They offer much better image quality than zooms, sharp into the corners, no vignetting, lower distortions, less CA, higher contrast, higher resolution, visibly sharper (though some of that is a function of the increased contrast), wider apertures. To name just a few of the advantages.
All lenses have compromises in design, zooms have more compromises than primes, the wider the range of the the more compromises the lens will need to have, it's just optics.
The 24mm - 70mm f2.8 is one of the better Nikon lenses, it's a workhorse of Pro photographers, it's a large lens and some aperture has had to compromised even here to get the zoom function, if you can I would wait and save for that.
You might still find the need for more specialist lenses, telephoto, macro etc., but they can be added as you find the need for them.
You will change cameras over the years as sensors develop, but good glass keeps giving with every image you take whilst using cameras from that manufacturer.