I would say if your using Nikon now your best bet is staying with it. There are cameras you can buy used that are better than your D7200 but not much. If you want to crop more then you might want to consider a full frame with high mega pixels. The best improvement you will get with nikon full frame would be going to the D810 or even the D850. The 7200 is a nice camera but doesn't have the greatest dynamic range. Both of the 810 and 850 cameras have remarkable dynamic range, the D850 (at about one stop higher DR than the 810) is likely the best dynamic range camera there is right now in less than medium format. If you are going to be shooting birds then the D500 is really nice and you can get one used pretty cheap. The sensor on the D500 has a tendency to clip highlights so you have to be kinda of careful at the bright end. With the 850 You would have to go with the nikon grip and D5 battery to start coming close to the shudder per second ability of the D500 though. That being said the D850 has a crop (or DX) mode that makes the DX lenses work so that you can use your old lenses until you purchase ff lenses if you go that way.

The truth is until you know why you want to upgrade it is hard to say what would be best. I've had 12, 24,36 and 46 megapixel Nikons. The high resolution is fantastic for cropping but once you get past 24 that's pretty much the only advantage, but that is a huge advantage.

I have the Tamron 150-600G2 and I paid full price and would do it again if something happened to this one. All the lenses mentioned are great but, you buy a long zoom to use at the long end. 600 is farther than 500 and it makes a difference. I have taken some wonderful long end pictures of birds.

I have taken some pictures handheld to see if I can do it. Yeah it can be done but at the long end it is nearly impossible to hold the camera still enough to get a good picture.

I shoot with a Nikon D850 which means the 600 is really 600mm on your 500 with a crop sensor you multiply the length by the crop factor which is 1.5, that means with this lens on your Nikon D500 you will go out to the equivilent of 900mm, what fun.

There are a million ways to take sunset pictures and they can all be great.

Sunset pictures depend a great deal on what the viewer likes. Personally I like a wide variety of sunset methods. One I like is using a very long lens and then trying to get a bird between me and the sun like the one I have attached. This can make the sun look very large. To do this however requires stopping the lens way down to reduce the brightness of the sun. The hazard of that is you might recuce the sky and land or water between you and the sun and then that makes the bird if you are lucky enough to catch one be just a silhouette.

The sun is so bright even at sunset that the auto features on your camera won't be able to meter it the way you want. Set your exposure for what you want to emphasize.

You don't always have to have the sun in the picture, often the best colors are after the sun has gone below the horizon. Since the sun goes down so quickly you will have a lot more time after the sun goes down below the horizon than once it gets to the horizion. Use your time wisely.

If you do decide to go wide instead of long it is good to have something in the forground like the weeds in the picture labeled Captiva shore.

SunRISE locations will be a lot less crowded than sunset but it's a lot easier to get to a sunset in time.

I keep hearing about people that switch but I haven't learned how to use all the features of my Nikon D850 yet. It is hard for me to imagine getting better pictures than what I am getting so I think it will be a while before I switch.

I use the exposure compensation, most of us have to to get what we want sometimes. If you shoot in Manual Mode of course you never have to use the compensation unless you are perhaps in auto-ISO. An example of when you would use it, you are outside at a dinner party and it is near sunset or dusk and the lighting is dim candle light, well the camera won't want to have any of this "dim" nonsense and will adjust the settings to give you a normal, bright picture. The candles will be washed out and it won't look like dusk it will look like the middle of the day. That is when you might want to adjust compensation down a couple stops. It can work the other way too, perhaps it is dusk but you want the scene to look bright, then simply adjust it up. Just make sure you remember to put it back to 0 so you don't ruin the shots after. You will need to adjust for most snow shots for example, all that white will confuse the camera. You could go to manual mode and get what you want or simply use compensation, it works.

Like Lenses and Cameras there are a vast number of different opinions on printers. It will likely always cost more to print at home than sending off your images to be printed, but, if you do print at home you can change the image, reprint and get what you want right away.

I do up to 13" x 19" at home and use a Canon Pixma Pro-10. There is a difference in different printers and their ink, some are dye based (most printers) and some are pigment based. The pigment based usually hold their color much much better than the dye. If you want pictures for your kids and grandkids to have for a long time get a pigment based printer.

I have used several brands of ink and honestly don't think one is better than the other, perhaps slightly different but not better or worse. Generic ink is a major cost savings for me.

I'm on my 3rd Pixma Pro printer, I wore two others out and the cost of repair was nearly the same as buying new so I did.

I like being able to print right after post production instead of having to send the image somewhere and waiting. I also like being able to make minor changes right away after seeing a print.

I have used Epson, HP and Brother image printers. I liked all but the Epson's kept having clogged head issues. I used the monthly charge for HP but when I went over the charge got to be pretty high. I eventually dropped the monthly ink and put generic in and HP remotly turned off the printer. Someone sued HP and then they sent out a patch to fix it so that it could work with generic but they made it difficult to use so I just got mad one day and threw the printer out into the trash. So far the Canons have been far and away the best printers for photo images.

I found out about the difference between the dye and pigments after deciding to remount a picture I had hanging in my den. When I pulled it out of the frame the part of the image protected by the edge of the frame was much more vivid than the part you could see when framed. That is when I got the Pixma Pro-10 instead of the Pro-100, the 10 has the pigments instead of dyes.

The Pro-10 is a thousand dollars retail but you can find it in the price range you are looking. There are sales and overstock or even perhaps used but they are available.

I've included a post from Ebay as an example of what you can find..

Good luck.

If you are going to be on Sanibel I would make this recommendation. After your wildlife shoot eat supper at the Mucky Duck resturant at the end of Captiva. Captiva is a smaller island than Sanibel but is attached at the far end of the island via a little bridge, no toll. The purpose for this is sunset. Take your longest lens/tripod combo and after supper (making sure you time it to be done by sunset) walk out to the beach (Next to the resturant) for one of the most wonderful places in the world for sunset pictures. You won't be alone but there is plenty of room. Parking is a premium on the islands but the Mucky Duck will let you continue to park there for free after your meal and the menu is reasonably priced and pretty tasty.

I have included an example of a sunset picture I took there last year. I used a long lens, 150-600 Tamron G2 but 300 will work very well. The Pelicans were very cooperative.

Don't leave your best lenses behind. This is what they are for, just be careful with them and keep them in a case when not on the camera.

I know exactly what you should do with them. One by one examine them and write on the back of the picture when and where you took it and the circumstances of why you happened to be there. You will enjoy the reminissing and whom ever inherits the pictures will have not only the picture but you with it. It will bring joy to your children, their children and theirs too.

I have pictures that are over 100 years old, I have some that I took that are over 60 years old, unfortunately some of them I don't recongnize. I have gone through and written on them at least the ones I recognize and the ones from my grandparents are expecially wonderful to me now.

I recommend taking the time and having fun with it.

My father once told me that opinions are like rear ends, everybody has one and most of them stink. So take anything said here with a lump of salt. Anyway, there are people who never use wide angle and people who live by it. Shooting wide angle landscape requires a totally different methodology than using a long lens. I highly recommend you peruse YouTube for wide angle landscape lectures, there is a lot to learn.

Basically a wide angle can do two things. First it can make a small area look huge. Second, it can make something close look far away. It is the second feature that you use in wide angle landscapes. Standing close to a 100 foot tall boulder you will be able to capture the entire boulder and make it look natural and like you are far away from it. Or you can capture something right in front of you with a landscape in the background and fit it all in the frame.

I originally bought a wide angle, a 14mm Sigma prime for realestate photography but saw a friends pictures of Arches National park with his Nikon 14-24 and I was impressed. It works really well once you learn how to use it. People who po, po wide angle for landscapes just don't know how to use it properly, it has it's place. After the Sigma 14 (I shoot with a D850, a full frame) I got a Tamron 15-30, it is now one of my very favorite lenses and I have a lot of lenses.

Someone suggested you rent a lens, make sure what ever you get is not a fisheye, that isn't the same thing and will terribly distort your images although with some work in Photoshop you can likely fix them it's a lot of work. Again as others have said, understand that when you see a wide angle if it isn't made for a crop sensor camera you will have to add your crop factor to it. For Nikon that means multiplying it by 1.5. That means that my very wide 14mm Sigma (115°) would only be an effective 21mm (81°) on your camera, still wide but not ultra wide.

Since 50mm (40°) is considered normal or what we see "normally" with our eyes you can see that a 21mm lens is twice as wide as normal. However on a crop sensor camera it would take about 35mm to get that same 40°. If a lens does not have "DX" in the description (at least for Nikon) then you have to use the 1.5 multiplier. If "DX" is in the description then the multiplier is built in already.

I have attached a picture taken with my Sigma 14mm. It is a picture of a civil war cannon at Perryville battelfield in Kentucky. I was litteraly under the cannon, in the shade of the cannon. It was at the top of a hill so the horizion really is curved although the sky is not, but notice the landscape behind the subject. I was close enough to the subject to reach up and touch it.

Remember that any image is translated from the sensor to either a screen or print paper to our eyes. Unfortunately each pixel can only record color and brightness. At a high resolution display our eyes see a smooth flow of color and brightness and our brain can pretty much do that down to about 300 pixels per lineal inch after that the colors and brightness don't gradually flow. When a picture is below about 300 pixels per inch you may not see the individual pixels but you will notice that the picture doesn't look natural. If you get substantially below 300 you will see dots and there will be no "natural flow" although your brain will try hard to make it flow.

It is true that with a high megapixel sensor or image that you can crop more, that is one of the biggest reasons for having a large sensor in the first place but it is easy to overdo the crop. We used to be happy with 7 megapixels, then we were thrilled with 12, then 24, then 36 then . . . . . . . . Eventually we will have much higher capacity sensors than are available now and perhaps we will be able to capture any image and zoom to what ever amount we want even using a wide angle lens but that time is not here yet. Get a nice telephoto, you will still need to crop though.

I love Full Frame but, the D500 is a very nice camera which is perfect for birds and other wildlife. The D5 is a slightly nicer camera than the D500 like the D3 was a slightly better camera than the D700, grab the D500 while you still can.

I like all my Nikon Glass but don't short change the Tamron 150-600. I have included a few pictures taken with it at quite a distance. These pictures are taken in low light on a Nikon D850. I know the Nikon 200-500 is brighter but the extra 100mm of the Tamron is a worthwhile extension.

Flowers are fun and red is great on a computer monitor.

These are all pictures I use as wallpapers on my computer.

Since it is about Valentines day note the heart hanging from the dog collar, it's appropriately red.

(Download)

First, get the D500 camera, it is dramaticdally better than the 7100.

Second, stepping up to FX is good, I know I did it after a couple of DX's. I loved my
D800, 810 and now 850 BUT the glass was not cheap. The D500 is probably the best cropped camera ever made and the capabilities are fantastic. It is almost a baby D5 and you already have the glass for it. With the better sensor you will want better glass than what you have but you will be ok with what you have until you can get what you want.

Third, there is a crazy rush to mirrorless cameras and a lot of people are selling their old gear to finance the switch. That is how I got my D850. Take advantage of this craze. I simply can't imagine liking any camera better than what I have and I think you will feel that way with the D500.

I shoot the D850 and knew before I got it that it did not have the popup flash, it almost kept me from getting it. At first I used the SB-900 as the commander but Nikon makes a CLS compatible SU-800 which sends an infrared signal to my SB900 and SB600's, it works great. I highly recommend it. There are likely other brands that do the same thing but I have to admit that the SU-800 works every time, even for high speed sync.

I have had the pixma Pro dye and pigment ink versions. I have thrown away my dye based printer after changing one of my prints to a different frame, the picture had faded very noticably over a period of only a few years. The Pigments don't change nearly as much and last a couple hundred years before you can notice any change.

I use the Pixma Pro-10 but have had it a few years now, I'm not sure which models are the pigments now but suggest you check.