Difference between a 10-30 mm lens and 30-110 mm lens?

I purchased a Nikon 1 J1 camera with a 10-30 mm lens. There's alos a 30-110mm lens. I'm new to all this and was wondering what the differences were? I'm so very confused…

10-30mm is the focal length, or amount of 'zoom' you have in the lens. 10mm is an extremely wide angle lens and will capture almost 180 degrees horizontally, but you won't be able to zoom in on objects far away. It might be suitable for shooting landscapes or city building scenes. 110mm means you can focus in on things further away such as birds/animals or shoot good closeups. You can go all the way up to 500mm + which would enable you to focus in and fill your whole picture with the moon. It just depends what you plan on shooting as to what lens you want. The 10-30mm would be suitable for portraits as well as most other things, but you will be limited with a maximum focal length of only 30mm.

The smaller the numbers, the shorter the focal length of the lens. Shorter focal lengths give a wider angle of view. The 10-30 is considered a standard lens for this camera, which will give you a wide to normal view. The 30 -110 is considered telephoto - which will give you a normal to close up angle of view.

Read this: http://imaging.nikon.com/...lity01.htm

The first one gives you much wider viewing angle sacrificing long-range capability.
The second one is able to shoot medium-long range.

First is good for landscapes, architecture
Second one's for portraits, animals…

Lenses are fitted to cameras based on the size of the sensor. Your camera sports a digital sensor chip that yields a miniature image 8,8mm height by 13.2mm length. First we calculate the diagonal measure of this rectangle. This dimension is important because if we fit the camera with a lens that approximately matches this value, the lash-up yields a "normal" view. By "normal" we mean not wide-angle and not telephoto. I will do the math for you, the answer is 16mm. What this means is, if we set the zoom at 16mm the angle of view will be in landscape (horizontal) orientation.

Now wide-angle starts at 70% of "normal" or shorter, that's 10mm or shorter. Telephoto is 200% of "normal" that's 30mm or longer.

Note that the 10mm thru 30mm zoom envelopes the beginnings of wide-angle and the beginnings of telephoto. This zoom span was wisely chosen by the maker to provide you with a good all-purpose entry lens.

Now the 30mm thru 110mm zoom is a telephoto good for sporting events and wildlife pictorials. Since 16mm is "normal" for this camera we divide 16 into the focal length to calculate the magnification this telephoto provides. At the low setting, 30mm the magnification is 30 16 = about 2x meaning this setting brings you twice as close. At the 110mm setting the magnification is 110 16 = 7 meaning the view will be the equivalent of peering through 7 power binoculars (7x). Thus the 30mm thru 110mm is a good choice for sports and nature photography.

Put one lens on the camera and move the zoom ring. See how the image changes.
Then do the same with the other lens and see how that one changes things.