Perhaps the camera companies have been right all along, when they recommend using TC only with top end prime or selected narrow range zooms

Actually the foot came before the inch, an inch is 1/12 of a foot, , why 1/12 ? that was decided 3000 yrs ago by the Babylonians, the foot is the average length of the foot of the first 100 men to come out of church on sunday morning
The Mile (coming from the latin Mille meaning 1000) is 1000 double paces of a Roman solder.
Everyone in England knew what a mille was since the romans put mile markers all over the country when they were in charge

5280 is just how it worked out when two unrelated standards collide

Regarding DOF question
Photoshop CC 2014 has an interesting tool "select/Focus area" that will provide a rapid display of how much of your picture is within a user specified sharpness range , also useful to see if your technique needs improving or if your camera has back/front focus issues
Obviously only during PP

oops sorry about that
the lens calibration product was obvious on their web page

It is not clear what you mean by lens calibration "datacolor" make Computer color calibration systems having nothing to do with the lens

some of the posts talk about focus calibration which is something different

One of the video clips on the Nikon web site confirmed that this is true, you would think that the manual would say so also

3. The article also indicated something about activating the VR with the auto focus press of the shutter button that I couldn't fully understand. Does anyone know what that means? Thank you[/quote]

I believe that if you use back button focus VR is activated only after the shutter released is depressed 1/2 way

Actually "hist" has nothing to do with "History" see attached discussion

"The word `histogram' is of Greek origin, as it is a com-
posite of the words `isto-s' (os) ( `mast', also
means `web' but this is not relevant to this discus-
sion) and `gram-ma' () (`something writ-
ten'). Hence, it should be interpreted as a form of
writing consisting of `masts', i.e., long shapes vertically
standing, or something similar. It is not, however, a
word that was originally used in the Greek language1.
The term `histogram' was coined by the famous statis-
tician Karl Pearson2 to refer to a "common form of
graphical representation". In the Oxford English Dic-
tionary quotes from "Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society of London" Series A, Vol. CLXXXVI,
(1895) p. 399, it is mentioned that "[The word `his-
togram' was] introduced by the writer in his lectures
on statistics as a term for a common form of graphical
representation, i.e., by columns marking as areas the
frequency corresponding to the range of their base.".
Stigler identies the lectures as the 1892 lectures on
the geometry of statistics [69]."

The responder here seems to have confused "shutter speed" (in the OP) and "film speed" (his response)

Assuming that your camera has two modes "Continuous" and "single"

In single mode the camera focuses once each time FL is depressed, in continuous mode the camera will continuously refocus as long as the button is depressed

I find that single is best for sitting birds and continuous for moving birds

Or use continuous mode and do as you suggest in the post

The shake filter actually works pretty well on the fly pic if the proper settings are used

There is obviously an overall 20 pixels or so of vertical shake, and in addition the eye has major issues perhaps out of focus and possibly some internal reflections

I set he analysis window to a small region on one of the legs and the bounds setting to 23 pixels and got the attached result, obviously not perfect with some evident halo effect, but overall much sharper

If one includes the eye in the shake analysis, the routine complains that it cannot find a good result, hard to find fault with that- there is definitely something strange about that eye

I find that with normal pictures having reasonable shake,blur and noise, that significant improvement is possible with a bit of fiddling

Using PSCC shake function, it is obvious that the bird has vertical motion (camera shake due to button depress?) while the boat has significant horizontal shift (due to wave action?)
Both can be separately improved
I do not see any significant noise issue, but agree with previous comments re increase exposure to improve dark areas then PP to get the rest according to your taste
Most denoisers allow independent correction for light and dark areas

If you have Photoshop CC, go to Filter/sharpen/shake reduction
if necessary set " Blur Trace Bounds" to 10
and observe the graphic in the box,

If you see a circular fuzzball you have focus blur and/or noise (Smaller ball is better)
If the fuzzball is unsymetrical oval or irregular you have motion blur. the direction of the axis of the blob indicates the direction of the motion

If you post a picture I could analyze it

Wikipedia has a good discussion here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_noise#In_digital_cameras

The issue, as is often the case, is more complicated than it appears at first glance

Thanks
Just what I was looking for