I'm a Nikon guy, but one of my best friends and birding buddies has a Canon 7D Mark II that he paid around $1800 for new. And it was worth it, it's a wonderful camera. It's even more worth the $1300 range now that holiday promotions are in full force and refurbs are as low as $1000. I've bought lots of refurb gear from the factory, both Nikon and Canon and have never been able to tell it from new. With a camera like that, you will eventually want some good glass, like the 100-400 L series lens if you're into sports and wildlife as you said, or maybe some primes. A word of caution, once you take the plunge into a better body, you will end up with a far larger investment in lenses, tripods, monopods, etc. than what the camera cost. You've been warned! Good luck.
After using Lightroom for a couple of years in earnest and absorbing many video tutorials on YouTube, at Adorama, B&H and at Adobe's web site, I got Tony Northrup's Kindle book on Lightroom 6 for $10. It took me to the next level. Even if you don't learn well from a book, it is well worth it, he has hours and hours of video tutorials linked to the book where he shows you everything from basics to advanced stuff in great detail. He also has another book that helped me immensely with the basics of digital photography, it's also a Kindle book with lots of video tutorials and is also $10. It's called Stunning Digital Photography, wherein he covers basics and then every type of photography known to man from weddings to birds in flight to sports to HDR to landscapes and on and on. Good luck.
Just did a church Christmas concert today with my D7200 and Sigma 18-300 and got good results in Shutter priority mode, 1/60 sec and auto ISO with a max of 6400, which I hit most of the time. The noise wasn't too bad. I usually shoot wider than I need and crop in the computer for a little more zoom, I seem to get less noise that way, since the aperture is more wide open the less zoomed I am, allowing more light into the sensor and keeping the ISO a little lower. I tried similar settings on Manual and the Shutter priority worked much better. Good luck.
got a D7200 which is very nice. I was ready to pull the trigger on a used or refurbished D7100 and the new body came out in the knick of time after what seemed a lifetime of rumors. You can get a refurbished D7100 these days for $500 and up, I'm toying with the idea for a second body since it uses the same spare batteries I have and my lenses. I think you'll be glad you made the move from the D7000, more megapixels, better low light performance and better continuous speed shooting, if that's important to you. Good luck!
Started on a D5200 and am now on a D7200. Learn the heck out of that D3300 and you'll be ready for the next step when the time comes, I've found pro style controls to be a big plus but learned on the D5200, which operates similarly to the D3300. Keep asking questions here at the Hog and helping others as you can. I'd highly recommend either Scott Kelby's series of books or Tony Northrup's $10 Kindle book, Stunning Digital Photography. It's a good field manual that takes you from the basics into every genre of image making. And, it's packed with hours of online video tutorials where he shows you how to do what he discusses in the book. The videos alone are worth it. He has a great discussion on RAW vs JPG. If you want to see a sample video from the book, just Google "Tony Northrup Back Button focus", this 5 minute video changed my world. Good luck.
Computer guy here. Never had a problem with a third party battery for a laptop or DSLR, just read the specs and go to a reputable source like those listed. I've had good luck with Vivitar batteries and after market chargers through Amazon. Good luck.
If you don't like to read, try Tony Northrup's Kindle book on Lightroom. It's only $10 and has hours and hours of online tutorials where he shows you the who, what, where, why and how. He's very easy to understand. I've been deep into Lightroom for about 3years now and I learned new tricks. His discussion of keywording and using the catalog to find a needle in a haystack is worth the $10 alone. Get it, you'll thank me. Also, the previous suggestions for Julieanne Kost at Adobe are right on. She's very good and the tutorials are free. Just get into the Help in Lightroom and you'll get there online. Good luck.
Computer guy here. Regardless of MAC or PC, it's good to have an external drive for local backup and it's also essential, unless you don't care about your images, to have a good online backup. I have 1.5TB out at Carbonite, it's unlimited and just works for $60 per year or about $110 a year with the added ability to backup one external drive of any size. I have a 4TB WD and a large spare hard drive in my desktop. My images for the current year are always on my laptop for editing, on a 1TB WD slim external drive for transferring to my desktop and the 2 drives in desktop system for redundancy and eventual backup to Carbonite. Call me paranoid, but I've seen people melt down when they've lost their life's work due to flood, fire, theft, you name the disaster. My 2 cents. Get a large external drive and a cloud backup service that you can set and forget, since most people don't have the disciple to manually backup or to check on scheduled backups until it's too late. Good luck.
Ditto. Since I first signed on 2 years ago, the amount of help I've received and been able to pay forward is very gratifying. Wile there are occasional flame wars and a bad apple or two, this place is much friendlier than other forums and has a good vibe. It'll only stay that way if we all contribute and help the admin police what needs policing. I'm ready for another good year at the Hog...
Great story and a good home for that lens. This will definitely lead to a GAS attack on your part...
As a fellow birder, it helps to be lucky as well. First you need to be there, then you need a camera, knowledge and skill age good too, but my best shots all had a little sprinkling of luck thrown in to spice things up. Good job!
If you backed up your catalog prior to this happening, you might be able to revert to the backup. You would lose any imports since the last backup however. To test this, I would back it up the way it is now (so you can get back to the point you are at now if you need to) and then load from the most recent backup. I back my catalog up every time I quit Lightroom and then cull out all the backups since the beginning of the month. I end each year with a backup from the last day of each month available to me. I'm a computer guy and have seen too many strange things happen over the years. My LR backups and images are also backed up to Carbonite in case the unthinkable happens. I currently have 1.5TB out there for $60 a year, unlimited. Good luck.
Truck got here a day early and I was able to get about a half hour of shooting in before dark. I've had it out a couple of times more. It's a cut above what I had in the Sigma 150-500. I can tell the autofocus is faster, the Image Stabilization is stronger (for you Canon guys, it's OS on a Sigma lens) and it has a couple of new features. It has a Manual Override on the Autofocus switch, besides on and off. It means I can twist the focus ring to my heart's content when I have a bird in a tree and I need to focus through limbs, leaves, etc without changing any settings and it autofocuses again the second I hit my back-button focus. It also locks at every major focal length. My 150-500 would creep out while walking unless I locked it at 150mm, the only choice. Now I can lock at 400mm if I want to and leave it there. Plus, it doesn't creep even when unlocked. Finally, it's 4 ounces heavier than my old Bigma, so it will be good for keeping me in shape. I hiked for an hour and a half this morning around our neighborhood pond and trails, with the body and monopod, it's like carrying half of a bowling ball. I can hand hold it in good light and was shooting at dawn on a monopod and getting respectable results. I'll post some images once I get them processed. The reach is great on a crop body and the IQ is good. Thanks for sharing in my GAS attack everybody!
It'll be carrying a Sigma 150-600 Contemporary, my Christmas gift to myself. I went to a local photo expo where there were Sigma reps, but they would only drop the price $50. They had better deals on older lenses like the 18-250, but were stingy on newer models. Online, I was able to get a bundle with extra goodies like a monopod, lens cleaning kit and few other things. Hoping this satisfies my most recent bout with GAS for awhile...
No problems with the Auto-ISO on my D7200 or my previous camera, a D5200 other than if I set the max value too high, which resulted in too much noise. I wonder if, as others have suggested, that a firmware update addressed this or maybe your camera needs servicing. I've spotted refurbed D7100 bodies for $499 lately, that's very tempting for a second body that would be very similar to my D7200. Hmmm. I feel a GAS attack coming on...