My first SLR

Hey :) .I am currently thinking about buying my first SLR, ive found my best choice to be the cannon 450D, but with a very limeted budget i now need to decide on what lens to get. ive singled my choice down to a few options, can anyone tell me what to go for, or any other options that would work well. I mainly plan to shoot landscapes and mountain biking. also what do you people use for your shots???

my choices are:
-Canon EOS 450D + 18-55 IS + 55-250mm IS
-Canon EOS 450D + 17-85mm IS
-Canon EOS 450D + Canon 18-55 IS + Tamron 70-300 + Bag + 2 UV filters.

Thanks for any advice
-Glenn :D

welcome glenn, just my two cents worth, if i was in your position i would go the 18-55 +55-250, the 55-250 ive bin told is a nice lens. good luck

Thanks, i was thinking about going for that one too.:D
also can anyone tell me what the numbers actually relate to, this might be something odvious im seeing past, but yeah it'd be good to know before i choose

they are the zoom, for example 10mm-100mm is a 10x zoom so is 28mm-280mm.
the higher the number the more zoom it will have. so the 18-55 and 55-250 will cover a range of zoom of 18-250. hope this helps

The first number is the focal range. On an APS crop body like the rebel you listed - 10mm is fisheye wide, 20mm is very wide, 30mm is wide, 40mm is normal, 60-90mm is mild telephoto, beyond is telephoto and super telephoto. For general purposes, the 17-70 range is the most useful.

the numbers that show after the focal range are also equally important, they are the lens aperture range. The lower the aperture number the wider the aperture diaphragm opens, and the more light it lets in. That said, I really dont like variable aperture lens like the ones you've listed (meaning, it opens up at f/3.5 at 18mm, but 5.6 at 55, and varies in between). I prefer to go with fixed apertures as they are more practically useful, and much better quality. The very best kit lens replacement I can think of is made by Tamron - the 17-50 f/2.8. I think that would be more useful than any of the kits you mentioned, even considering the lack of telephoto.

I do think landscapes and mountain biking shots would be very well covered in the 17-50 range.

thanks, that helped a lot :), i think ill go for the 450D with an 18-55 IS, then ill save up for the tamron you mentioned.

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Originally Posted by Anbesol

The first number is the focal range. On an APS crop body like the rebel you listed - 10mm is fisheye wide, 20mm is very wide, 30mm is wide, 40mm is normal, 60-90mm is mild telephoto, beyond is telephoto and super telephoto. For general purposes, the 17-70 range is the most useful.
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Are you sure about that? The Rebel has a correction factor of 1.6x which makes the 40mm the equivalent of a 65mm - a bit long to be called "Normal".

Explanation for the original poster: when we talk about the view you get with a given lens, we usually refer to the focal length we knew and loved with 24x36mm film cameras - 50mm was a "normal" lens, 28mm was a "wide-angle", 90mm was a "short tele", etc. Most DSLR's have a smaller sensor than 24x36mm. As they are only taking the central part of the frame, the view you get with a given focal length is more telephoto than what you expect. The "correction factor" is a bit of mental arithmetic to understand what the view of a given lens will be with a given camera.

I hope I haven't made that too complex. Here's how I would classify focal lengths for the Rebel, with a correction factor of 1.6x

Wide-wide-angle = 10mm (equivalent of a 16mm on a film camera)
Wide-angle = 18mm (equivalent of a 28mm)
Normal = 31mm (equivalent of a 50mm)
Telephoto = 55mm (equivalent of a 90mm almost)
Long telephoto = 125mm (equivalent of a 200mm)
Super telephoto = 300mm (equivalent of a 500mm almost)

The correction factor for most DSLR's made by Nikon, Sony, Pentax is 1.5x. For Olympus DSLR's it's 2x. For "Full Frame" DSLR's like the Nikon D3, Canon 5D or Sony A900 the correction facor is 1x because the sensor is the same size as a 24x36mm film.