For general use, the 18-300 should give you a lot of flexibility. Generally where the superzooms fall short is in aperture, so the low light situations are tough for them. If you find yourself shooting a lot in low light, you might consider another lens just for that. However, unless you spring for either a fairly expensive lens or two or more lenses, you will probably lose a lot of the range you currently have. You will have to decide whether the wide angle or telephoto is more valuable to you in low light situations.

Unless you shoot a lot of dynamic scenes in low light, a tripod might just help you out. If there are people in the scene, they do move about when you don't expect it, so one possible approach is to use the tripod and take multiple shots of the same thing. Then you can pick the one that is clearest. You don't lose anything because after you get past the capital cost, the digital pictures are free (except for the time you spend sorting things out later).

The 1.5x crop factor is just that. A field of view change caused by cropping. The sensor is smaller, so the field of view is smaller. Your 50mm lens gives you the same image on FX and DX, but the DX sensor only looks at the center of the image, not the whole thing.

There are all sorts of "explanations" out there, and a lot of people get confused by them. You're not changing the lens characteristics by using a smaller sensor. You're just (effectively) cropping the image by that factor of 1.5.

First of all, never changing lenses is not a defense against getting dust in your camera. (1) some dust is left in during the manufacturing process; (2) some dust is created by movement of mechanical parts (mirror, shutter); (3) lenses are not airtight and need to adjust to atmospheric pressure changes, so air is always moving into or out of the camera, possibly carrying dust with it. In fact, since you have to change the volume of air in your camera when you focus your lens, that's another source of air movement in/out.

Cleaning your lenses is a fact of life: everyone is familiar with that. Cleaning your sensor is also a fact of life, whether you change your lenses or not. Most people are reluctant to do it themselves, since the sensors cost a significant fraction of the camera and replacement incurs additional labor costs (and is something you really can't do yourself). I was in that boat and didn't clean my sensor for a couple years, until I got a new camera body. Eventually it got some visible dust on the sensor and I decided it needed to be cleaned. Since I had an old camera body, I tried it on that first. It was so easy I went right ahead and cleaned the D3 sensor. Took about 10-15 minutes. I now do it myself whenever it is needed.

I use a Rocket Blower and pec pads with Eclipse fluid.

I bring up a blank page on my word processor so I have a white screen. I then turn off autofocus, set the lens to a small aperture, and take a shot of the screen from a couple inches away. Nothing's in focus, so there's no structure in the image except for the dust. Look at the image and see what the dust pattern looks like. Using the computer like that allows you to do this all at your desk, without going outside to take a picture of a clear sky, it allows you to do it in partly cloudy weather, or at night. You don't have to have an uncluttered wall to take a picture of. You can do it all sitting at your desk and it takes much less time and it's a consistent light source.

Next, take the rocket blower, give it a few squeezes to blow out any dust that accumulated in the nozzle (I store it in the package so that should minimize any dust there). Then take the lens off and blow out the mirror box. Then raise the mirror and blow off the sensor. Note that your camera should have a mirror-up setting. Use that instead of the bulb or time exposure setting because it turns off the power to the sensor, so there's no static charge there to attract dust. Put the lens back on and repeat the dust checking step above. If there's still some dust, try it again. I do this three times before moving to a wet cleaning.

If the wet cleaning is necessary, I take the moistened swab and run it one way across the sensor, then the other way. That uses both sides of the swab. I have never had to use more than 3 swabs.

Filters will protect against light impacts such as blowing sand or dust or flying mud, swinging clothing, insects, etc. They won't protect against medium sized rocks or sticks. Anything that has the potential to break the filter can damage the lens with the pieces of the filter. That's not to say that filters should not be used in the case of blowing sand etc.

There's no reason a filter can't have a coating as good as a lens. The good coatings tend to be more expensive (but price is not always an indicator of quality).

A hood provides mechanical protection against impacts by large items. It also helps to protect against flare caused by light hitting the lens (and/or filter) from the side. It's a good idea to use a hood all the time unless you're shooting in a VERY confined space.


There's no reason to use a UV filter if a clear filter is available. UV filters were developed for film. Glass does not transmit UV well (except for near UV) so your lens probably provides all the UV filtering you will ever need.

Protection: A filter can provide some protection from light stuff (fingers, clothing, dust, salt spray, flying mud, things like that). It provides no protection from heavy impacts. If it can break the filter, the pieces of the filter can damage the lens. For protection from heavy impacts, the lens hood is the best thing you can use. It will provide some protection from impacts that run up to structural damage beyond the lens.

Flare: A filter provides additional surfaces that the light has to traverse on the way to the image plane. Each surface has the potential to produce flare when extraneous light hits it from the side. Lenses are coated, some surfaces better than others, with materials that reduce reflections. Filters can also be coated with these materials, so if you use a filter, make sure it has the best coating you can find. Again, the lens hood will reduce extraneous light from hitting the lens, so it should be left on.

Some people cannot see the degradation a filter produces. For those people, leave your filter on. But also leave your lens hood on. It will provide more protection than the filter.

From one of the over 70 crowd: Our phone didn't have a dial. You lifted the earpiece and talked to the operator in the mouthpiece. (And we had it easy. The telephone didn't have a crank).

VR works by moving (decentering) one of the elements of the lens. If VR is on, the lens element may be dithering, and if you use a fast shutter speed you may catch it when it's off center.

Most VR lenses will lock the element in the center when VR is turned off.

Don't get me wrong: I think VR is useful, but not all the time.

I have VR off unless I feel it's needed. Generally that's in low light (unless I'm using a tripod).

VR is not perfect, but it can help. However I feel it can degrade an image under some conditions. I generally try some test shots, then blow them up to see if the image looks like there's some camera motion showing. If so, I'll try to turn VR on.

The VR sampling rate is around 1 KHz, so the Nyquist frequency would be 500 Hz. That means for anything faster than 1/500 second, the VR will not work, and may even produce some defocusing.

10 cents? When I was a kid they were 3 cents. A fortune, back then. If you found a penny, it was worth bending over to pick it up.

Pop bottles had a 2 cent deposit. They were glass. No cans, and when cans came in you had to open them with a "church key"


There were pay phones. 10 cents a call. You could call home, or your friend's home. If there wasn't anyone there, too bad.


We used to sit in the bed of the pickup truck. Could fit 10 kids in there.

That's true if you overwrite the original file. I think the poster was saying that opening the file, editing it, and writing it to a new file with a different name would preserve the original file. True, the new file with a different name is slightly degraded by the write operation, but the original file has not been rewritten.

I'm happy to say I've never been in that position.

Camera settings are all different for the different shots, but should be in the EXIF data. They were taken with a D3 or D4.

No flash. These are all in sunlight. Many of the shots are at high ISO (4000-10000) to get the highest shutter speed at f/11 or so. These things move around so much you may not be focused on the right spot when the shutter actually opens so I use a high f/ number. The wings are going at around 30 flaps/second so I want a high shutter speed. Many of the shots I had the camera set to 10 frames/second to try to get several shots. I then picked the best one(s).

When I saw one of these critters I would follow it around the field. Eventually it would get used to me and concentrate on feeding instead of trying to get away from me. They seem to like blue or purple flowers, and prefer Verbena bonariensis.

I understand that due to time constraints, jpg can be the way to go, but I've never really understood why it would be necessary to shoot jpg instead of RAW just because "modification" of the image is prohibited.

After all, you can change the camera settings to produce fairly "wild" results in the SOOC jpg.

While the idea of using multiple free cloud accounts for storage is attractive, there is one hitch to CloudBacko.

From their website: "CloudBacko is the only solution that also encrypts filenames in addition to file contents of your data on your computer before sending to the cloud."

What that means is that if CloudBacko disappears, your data may be there, but it's still encrypted. It wasn't clear from the website that you could retrieve your data without the software.

And transmittable via the internet!