Camera Lens Selection?

I want to take interior pictures of house rooms that show as much of the room as possible in fairly close or detailed views. I have a digital Nikon 70s camera. What lens would I need to accomplish the photos? Wide angle, macro? What aperture and lens size do you recommend?

There were no digital cameras in the 70's but anyhow you need a wide angle for this; not as wide as a fish eye, but something like a 24 or 28 mm cinventoinal lens would be ok

You'll need to have a wide angle lens for this. If you're standing in the corner of the room you'll need a viewable angle of 90 degrees to fit it in. Wide angle lenses are expensive but I've included a link to one of the most inexpensive ones.

You can also get screw-on adapters for existing lenses that convert them to wide angle, but generally these have pretty awful quality, blurry, chromatic aberration, etc.

You should also bear in mind that if you are using a flash in indoor photography, a "naked" flash won't usually provide enough coverage to illuminate your entire field of view evenly. You can work around this with a flash diffuser, which is basically a piece of translucent white plastic that goes in front of the flash and spreads the beam around a bit.

In terms of aperture, you should aim for a reasonably small aperture to ensure enough depth of field that near and distant objects in the room are both in focus. In reality, you might not have the choice to do this, as it may make the shutter speed too long. You could use a tripod, or you could settle for wide-open aperture.

Tokina 11-16mm.f/2.8

Since your D70 has an in-body focus motor, It will focus with your D70.

Since it is a fast f/2.8, it is a moderate low-light lens.

And it has a 104 deg field-of-view, so it will give you great coverage.

The only thing better is a Nikon 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye, It has an incredible 180 deg field-of-view, but will introduce significant barrel distortion. Although that can be corrected somewhat with software, such as Nikon's Capture NX2.

An alternative approach is to use a tripod and your kit lens, take several photos and stitch them together as a panorama. You will need photoshop or similar photo software to stitch the photos together, but it will give you the best low-distortion photo.

With a panorama, you can take as many photos as you need, and get as close as you need.

You won't need a macro lens unless you want to take photos of every screw head, nail, or carpet-thread in the room as a macro can get that close.

Comment:

Jorge; a Nikon D70s is a camera model, not it's vintage.