The best advice I have seen on this topic is to rent the lens and try it for yourself. I tried the Nikon, Sigma and Tamron versions of this lens and found that in use I was consistently turning off the auto focus on the Tamron version. I found the picture quality of the Nikon and Sigma were both good. Actually using them let me take the Tamron off the list. The various rental companies run specials all the time, sign up for their emails.
Once again, try it first was the best advice. The rentals are not free but considering the substantial investment your looking to make, I felt it was well worth it

Thanks

Saw an article that if you went to cancel your Adobe Plan they would offer you 60 days for free. If you go to your account page and walk through the cancellation process towards the end should be "Offers" and when you get to that point just click on the 60 days free offer.
I don't believe this had been posted here yet, thought it might be of interest

Not an app but this website has a good Interactive Night Sky Map

timeanddate.com/astronomy/night/

might be of help

Skylum's Photolemur 3 software is currently available for free via a link through the PetaPixel site. Not that it's particularly expensive to start with, but free is even cheaper.
If you're interested in automated processing, or like me and still exploring post processing it might be of interest. I could also see using it just to "pump out" some jpegs and leave the manual processing to more select photos. It's a simple drag and drop automated process. I tried a few shots and was pleased with the results.

petapixel.com/2019/09/10/get-this-ai-photo-editor-for-free-and-stop-wasting-time-on-manual-processing/

Hopefully this doesn't violate any of the rules of this site and maybe someone will find this useful, I just thought free was a pretty awesome price.

SSD's are awesome .... Small, fast and as stated no moving parts to wear... which also means that as a purely electronic device they either work or they don't. They can, and do fail and when they do it can be with no warning whatsoever.

Thanks.
I am shooting raw but my Lightroom skills have a way to go
I appreciate your input.

I felt the same way, pre ordered on Kickstarter. Delivery kept getting pushed back. Ultimately I read so many negatives from people who couldn't get it to work that I cancelled the order.
If it does work for you apparently it's does all kinds of things you can already do, or you could do it with something else that works better.
They did refund my money quickly so that's a plus.

Matrix, and it's a good question because I never even considered it at the time

Thanks for the encouragement.
Actually all of the pictures I took were from one of three vantage points, none of which was close to the subject. I have the one lens at this time and it is not a zoom. Every picture was cropped to get in closer.

I knew as soon as I saw it that those windows would be my downfall but I was hoping to avoid using the flash. I just feel like its maybe too intrusive ? I always try to get shots of the whole event and I always share the pictures, but the bottom line is I am there hoping to get a decent shot of my kid so I am a little self conscious of being intrusive not to mention distracting the performers.

and yes, high school jazz band

They were shot raw so I did some light processing in Lightroom (also working on my Lightroom skills).
Generally I did lens correction and either auto exposure or some light exposure adjustments because the Auto correction was not good

So I'm fairly new to this, got my camera about 6 months ago, still learning my way around it and what settings I should be using (I'm in manual mode). It seems I frequently find myself trying to get shots in really adverse lighting conditions. I was trying to get some shots of the school band performing at the local Barnes & Noble for a fundraiser. Of course they were set up in front of big windows and I had maybe 3 vantage points to shoot from.
I find the results less than overwhelming and was hoping for some feed back and maybe some advice on what I could have done differently, camera settings, etc.
The first three are just very unimpressive ... grainy and the people often appear almost as if they had been superimposed after.
The last two are what I feel were probably two of the better shots.
The camera is a Nikon D750, Nikkor 50mm 1.4 lens (so it's probably not the equipment), ISO was up around 1600 (which I didn't think would introduce so much noise) which leaves the operator as the problem. I was also shooting some wide apetures in hopes of de-emphasizing the background at least a little. I just feel I might have done better in full auto but I would be interested in any criticism and or suggestions for improvement.
Thanks in advance for your input.

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One of the better ones

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Just OK

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If the drive is recognized when plugged into the computer it is probably not a dead drive. Most likely it became corrupted which can result from unplugging before it's ready to be unplugged. ( I always use the disconnect utility in the system tray whether it's with drives, SD cards, USB sticks since I have lost all of the above). If the drive is corrupted you may have only lost the allocation table which basiclly tells your computer where to look for your data and your data could very well be there perfectly intact. Don't keep trying to do repairs, it may only make it worse. Depending on how important the data is to you there are various recovery utilities that can recover your data ranging from free to paid as well as data recovery companies, once again how valuable is the data to you? I have recovered data in the past and I found most of the free options were too limited in capability, I ended up buying a program by EASUS(?) which did the job, but be prepared .... every file that was written to the drive will be recovered including deletions that have not been over written on the drive and you won't recognize any of the file names because they will all be in "computer speak" as opposed to what you named them. Learned my lesson the hard way and now I always wait for the computer to tell me when it's safe to unplug.