Post a sample with the D850

Full moon is not great if you are looking for contrast and detail - the lighting is very flat.

The Kenko 2X TC will take away 25% of your sharpness.

The TX will turn your F5.6 lens into an F11 lens

You shouldn't rely on auto focus. Better to use live view and focus manually, very carefully. You will get far better results.

These were taken with a D800 - first image using a Sigma Sport 150-600, the second using a Nikkor 600mm F4 neither lens was fine tuned on that body. I just typically make sure when I get a new piece of gear that it is up to factory spec. This allows me to use lenses and cameras interchangeably and without any hesitation.


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Well, for starters since the D850 is FX the moon will be about 1/3 smaller in the frame so it will entail more cropping, but that shouldn’t be an issue with the 45 MPs of the D850 it shouldn’t matter. I know nothing of your 2x teleconverter so I have no idea whether the trade off in reach is worth any degradation of IQ.
The thing is all you said is that the pictures “aren’t the same” with no specifics. Is the problem sharpness? Exposure? What? Maybe it needs to be fine tuned to that lens. Try shooting in live mode and focus manually.
Really for my money a full moon is the most boring moon shot. All the light is straight on. Try 3/4 or half moon and the side light will show the relief better.

I read that the 85mm lens is an ideal lens for portraiture work. However, if you have a cropped DSLR camera, that’s a lens that seems impossible to buy as all of the 85mm lenses I see for sale, including the Nikon, are for full frame cameras. So that an 85mm lens placed on a cropped camera, as I believe most of us own, will actually be a 127mm lens, not a great portrait lens. Therefore, for most of us, I guess we should be using a 50mm lens that will give us an actual 75mm effective focal length which is closer to the recommended 85mm lens. I’m I thinking correctly here or am I missing something?

I am considering moving from Luminar 3 to a Creative Cloud subscription. I see that I would get Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. I believe that with a lot of training I would be better off than with Luminar. My question is with license. If I subscribe would I be able to use the software on two different computers, a PC and a MacBook Pro or would the license limit my download to just one device? My reason for change is because when I was editing a 24 meg file off my d750 I had no problem, sense my purchase of a d850 the large file size is choking Luminar to a slug pace. Thanks

Well I was looking to replace my nikon D7100 and was looking on amazon website. But I did go to Best Buy to look at it. It was between the Nikon D500 and the D850. After using both just in store with my SD card I decided on the D850. Mainly because it’s full frame and I was told that if I wanted that extra reach with the zoom lens that's I all ready own which are FX lens I could put the D850 in DX mold a still have a great camera for wild life. But I told the sells person at Best Buy which I think he’s one of the few who knows what they are talking about that my main goal was take great portraits of my children.

When I bought my D7100 the only lens I would buy a FX not DX expected for the kit lens that came with it. 18-140 and I haven’t tried it yet on the D500. My lens are Nikon 50mm 1.4 D and a 1.8 D I like the 1.4 better the 60mm 2.8 D which I loved on the D7100 camera, 85mm 1.8 not D. My next lens is between the Nikon 105mm or a Nikon Zoom. What lens would you recommend next for portraits the 105mm or a zoom?