Please can you explain lenses to me?

The Nikon camera i'm looking to buy says that it comes with an 18-55 mm lens. Well i'm just kind of confused as to what that means/what the lens can do/what it's good for?

Also one day if i were to buy another, i was just wondering if you could explain what the numbers/mm mean to help me find what i'm looking for?

Mm is the focal length. 50mm is the standard human view, longer are telelenses, you see things closer into a narrower angle, that uses to be good for nature sport etc when you need to get closer to the subject; wide angle lenses are under it, so your zoom cover this range. Learn a bit more in here,
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/...lenses.htm

This is referring to the distance the lens will focus in millimeters. People say 50mm is closest to what you would see with your eye, but that is if you have no peripheral vision of course. So anything lower than 50mm is starting to be able to capture a wider view of an area than you could see looking straight forward.

However I would make the assumption this is a entry level nikon and it probably has a cropped sensor, as opposed to a full frame. The d3000 for example is a 1.5 crop so any focal length you multiply by 1.5 and that is the actually distance the lens see's. So on the 18-55 you are really able to capture 27-82.5MM

Mm is the zoom, 55 mm equals about 4 x, the longest one is about 300/400 mm, but if you bay the type of super zoom camera, it can gets up to 870 mm, about 35 x

These will help you:

http://www.nikonusa.com/...enses.page

http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/how-to-choose-a-digital-slr-camera-lens

http://www.digital-slr-guide.com/best-digital-slr-lens.html

I always recommend buying a camera with the standard 18-55mm zoom lens and then taking the next 6 months or so to learn how to actually use your new camera. During this time you'll begin discovering what kind of photography (landscapes, portraits, close-ups, street scenes, sports, etc.) you like doing the most and the capabilities and limitations of the standard 18-55mm zoom lens.

Based on the knowledge of what kind of photography you like doing the most you can then intelligently choose a lens that will best enhance your kind of photography.

Never, never, never buy a lens until you know why you need it, how you'll use it and how it will enhance your photography. Buying a lens just because someone says they have it and its a great lens and they love it is not a valid reason to buy a lens unless you already know that its a lens that will enhance your photography.

Nikon has a video tutorial for their DSLR cameras. Here is a link for the D3100:

http://www.nikondigitutor.com/eng/d3100/index.html If you're buying the D5000 or D5100 just substitute that model number for d3100 in my link.

18-55mm refers to the range of focal lengths that this lens can give you, because it's a range it's a zoom lens. There are also lenses which don't zoom, these will only have one number (for example, 50mm).

Focal length is how photographers measure the angle of view a lens produces (i.e. The amount of a scene you can see through a given lens). With lenses like the 18-55mm, they are designed for cameras with smaller sensors, so they produce narrower than expected fields of view. At 18mm should be able to get a reasonably large scene (about this much ) At 55mm you'll get quite a narrow frame, it's more suited for upper body portraits, and head shots (around about this ).

Now if you used a 250mm lens, you could pick out stuff from very far away, like so.

In 35mm parlance (which is what your average digital camera is behaving like), 50mm is considered "normal" i.e. Things look as they would with your own eye. Less that 50mm is considered "wide-angle," and is good for getting a lot of landscape in, but may cause things in the center of frame to be abnormally large when used close up. Longer that 50mm is considered "telephoto"; this can bring a distant object "closer," but also has a tendency to compress your view, causing things to look like they're piled one in front of the other when they're actually rather far apart. It's fairly easy to understand if you can look at examples. Any basic camera book will probably have examples of the different focal lengths that you can compare.