Hi!
I work in Real Estate and own a D3000.
I'm in the market for a wide angled lens suitable for photographing my homes for sale.
Price isn't too much of an issue, after doing some research I was looking into the Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 HSM, is this suitable for the D3000?
Any help you can give me would be very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Deb
P.S recommend* oops!
Good wide angles are expensive, ones with low distortion even more. If you are going to be in real estate business for a long time, then you should think of upgrading your system. The quality of images you want, will determine the lenses.
1.
Level 1. Here you can use your kit 18-55 lense, especially for the exteriors. If you find that 18mm is not wide enough, you can stitch two or more shots to go wider. For interiors you will need to stitch even with 10mm if you want to shoot a small to medium room. So learn how to stitch multiple images to over come the limitation of the lenses. You will always get situation where barring fish eye no lense can take in the whole interior in one shot.
2.
Level 2. At this stage you will want better images, so external flash and lights will be of more value. Learn how to use external lighting to jazz up your shots.
3.
Level 3. Move over to full frame, say D610. Now you have a plethora of lenses which would be wide enough. A 20mm lense in FF will have more FOV than a 14mm in DX. Similarly a 14mm in FX has more FOV than a 10mm in DX. You also have a lot of older AIS wide angle lenses as well as "D" lenses to choose from. Many older lenses are quite good and are very reasonably priced.
4.
Level 4. If you want to get perspective correction in the camera it self, then add PC lenses. PC lenses are used quite a lot by Architects.
Finally higher MP sensors give you a lot of scope for cropping your shots. A D3000 sensor has about 3,900 pixels on the long end. The 24MP sensor has 6,000. That is 50% more pixels to play around with. If you crop 50% all around you will still have more pixels than in the D3000.