We are headed out to take an Alaskan Cruise in a couple of weeks and I am having a quandary on how much gear to take. My main camera is a D810 which will obviously go. I have narrowed it down to 3 lenses, my 16-35, my 24-120 & my 200-500. (Hoping for a whale shot). The question is whether to carry my D300S for the extra reach with the long lens. I loaded it all in my backback and it weighs a whopping 19 lbs. But I'll only carry all that while traveling to and from Seattle. Once I get on the ship it will just be one camera and maybe one extra lens when I'm taking pics. Does anyone have any advice? I could forgo the D300S body but I sure like the extra reach of the crop sensor.

Thanks!

I love Collections and it is a tremendous time saver when you take a lot of photos. I enter the photography contest at our county fair every year so I have a collection for fair photos. As I go through the year taking photos if I have one that I might think is a candidate for fair, I drag it into the Fair Collection. (Keep in mind, putting a photo in a collection does not really move it, it just puts a pointer to the actual location that the computer can use to find it so you don't have to.) Similarly my daughter is a budding horse jumper. I have literally hundreds of photos of her practicing her jumps. Even with the use of key words, sorting through that many photos of the same subject can be tedious. So I drag the ones I like into a collection for her jumping. When it comes time to print and display I just go to the collection I am interested in and cull from a much smaller sample set, plus I do not have to remember what folder I put the original picture in. By the end of the year (for the fair example) remembering where the pictures are can be a real problem!

Good luck with them. Also I would put a plug in for Keywords. I am very disciplined about adding them to my pictures when I import as well as when I post process. Another very useful tool for finding your pictures more easily.

Unfortunately, I had a similar experience with this lens a while back on a Nikon. Made many shots on tripod all across the aperture range, VR on, VR off, etc. Result was always the same- soft images. Sigma wanted me to send both the camera and the lens to them, but I have multiple camera bodies so that was not an answer. I wound up trading it in for about half what I paid for it on a Nikon 70-300.

My first thought was similar to dennis. If your camera is set to center weighted or spot metering, and it is focused on the two of you, the exposure could be several stops different from one that is average weighted over the whole scene with about half the picture being sky. I agree, the best test would be take the same scene with both cameras at the same time.

I always save both Raw and jpeg. Like most all my creative photography is post processed raw. But on lots of occasions when I have just grabbed my camera to shoot some family outings or something and others (like my 17yo daughter) wants a copy to post on her facebook it is handy to just be able to grab the jpg and send it to her.