Probably a really dumb question, but I have to speak up!

[Fotografer]

I've had my Nikon D3000 for about 6 months now but one of the luxuries I have at uni is that we have a 'store' whereby a technician loans out equipment for free and I normally just say 'I want a Canon 10D with a zoom lens or a wide angle lens'</p>
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<p>This situation has got me confused with the whole 'numbers' aspect of lenses, if you get what i mean? I wa snever taught it and i've never known where to start trying to find out what means what.</p>
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<p>I want a wide angle lens for my Nikon but I'm now in a rutt where i don't understand how the number relate to the lenses.</p>
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<p>For example, i call a 50mm lens a standard lens. So what am i looking for in a wide angle lens? So confused and embarrassed <img src="http://thephotoforum.com/forum/images/smilies/blueface.gif" border="0" alt="" title="sad" smilieid="108" class="inlineimg" /></p>
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[wahuy]

35mm and below is a wide angle.
But if you are using a D3000, which is a DX sensor you have to multiply the number with 1.5

So '35mm' for DX sensor is about 24mm (24*1.5=36)

D3000 kit lens is a nice lens, it performs good enough that cover 18mm-55mm (28-82.5 in FX terms

[morxs]

actually, wide is quite relative to specific camera ie. crop sensor camera (nikon has 1.5 ratio and canon has 1.6 ratio) and full frame camera. full frame camera didnt multiply your field of view regarding what lens you are attached to the camera. ie. 17mm is always 17mm for full frame camera. but not for crop sensor camera, if you have crop sensor nikon, and you attach 17mm lens to it then your field of view will be multiplied with 1.5 will become 25.5mm field of view. for full frame sensor, 24mm already considered wide.
aside from that, what need to consider is the space compression between foreground (your subject) with the background. wide lens will make all the background appear smaller, opposite to telephoto lens which relatively make your background appear bigger.
fyi, normal lens is around 50mm (space compression that will look like our eyes see)