Ask and you shall receive – here is a review! Hopefully some other people will chime in as well, as I would also like to hear what has worked for others.
After a lot of research, I chose to buy a Nikon D50 camera along with a Nikkor AFS 24-120 mm VR lens in January 2006. I am still searching for the holy grail of lenses, but initially I wanted an all-purpose lens I could just leave on the camera, especially for travel photography. Despite the fact that I already had Canon lenses from my old film camera, I switched to Nikon mostly because I really wanted spot metering, which was not available on the equivalent Canon DSLR model at the time.
My reasons for choosing this combination were:
• relatively lightweight
• reasonable cost
• good all-purpose lens
• spot metering
• comparatively little distortion
• good range for portraiture
• works well in low light
Some reviewers have found that the lens produces images that are a bit soft, but it has worked out fine for my purposes, which include photo reference for painting and travel photography. Buying a lens that takes sharper photos would likely cost a great deal more and be far heavier and bulky. When I use photographs as a reference for painting portraits, I don’t make color prints at all, so I am not worried about making crisp blowups to paint from. Instead, I view a number of images on my computer screen which show different exposures.
Sometimes there is a bit of difficulty with the camera trying unsuccessfully to focus in low light situations, but I usually just focus manually when the need arises. I have some travel photographs at
www.pragueidyll.blogspot.com, all taken with this setup. The main frustration with the lens occurs when taking pictures of interiors (can’t capture as much of the room as I would like) and buildings (where you definitely see some barrel distortion). For this, I really need to get another lens with greater wide angle capability. If you are mostly going to use the camera for photo reference for painting portraits and shooting artwork, you may be perfectly happy without the wider angle.
When I was making a decision about which lens to buy, there were lenses with greater range than the 24-120 VR, but the distortion was worse, whereas the 24-120 VR has relatively little distortion, especially in the middle range of the zoom.
I believe that the 18-55 mm lens you are considering is not the best choice for portraiture. It would be great for travel, but will not allow you to take close up shots of the head and shoulders without distortion, as you will have to stand too close to the subject to accomplish it. As Marvin already pointed out, you need to get far back from your subject to avoid photographic distortion.