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I totally agree except I would hate to lose my 85. Goodness but that lens is so wonderful for portraiture. Yes the 105 is ok for portraiture, it's a pretty good length but I only use it for macro. I can cover the 85mm range with a couple of my zooms but the overall quality of the Nikon 85 (I use the very inexpensive 1.8 Nikon version) is impossibly wonderful. I have attached a quick snap with the 85 1.8, it was literally an unexpected candid shot of a friend sitting in my living room. I wonder how cool it would have been if I was trying to get a nice head shot. Quality wise I don't see how I could have done any better in a studio with lights and tripod. I know this isn't a flattering shot but it is perfect quality.

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I have a very similar kit except I also have a 14mm 2.8 prime that is dusty now because of the Tamron 15-30 2.8. I used to love my Nikon 50 1.4 because of low light performance but my 24-70 2.8 does as well as the 50 prime, in fact my 24-120 f:4 is good enough most of the time. The low light performance was important with my older cameras but with my Nikon D850 and Z7 my high ISO performance is so good that I don't need as much speed. When I do get a little noise Photoshop noise removal is just remarkable enough that I don't worry any more.
I have attached an example. A picture of a couple grandkids and their mother sitting at the piano. No special light just the room lights. ISO 2200 on the Z7 at f:8. When I took it it had noticeable noise but Photoshop Camera Raw Noise Removal took care of it.

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Batteries are not cost effective, but if the grid is down for more than several days or even weeks your generator won't hold up and you will only be able to run it a few hours a day. The other problem is fuel. If the grid is down filling stations are not going to be open and how dependable will natural gas be if everyone is using it and there is no electricity. You can only store so much gasoline. If the grid is down for a long time I'm in a good position with 12KW on the roof. I average anywhere between 25 and 40KW a day usage without regulating my usage. Without A/C I can easily get down to 20 or below, my system will handle that even considering several days without sun. If it really gets bad I can run the 16KW generator for about 4 hours and get two days of battery out of it. I can usually get 20KW a day even in overcast skies. Rain, not so much but rain in Kentucky is not like England. I lived in Scotland for a few years and it was nearly always overcast. In that case you need to have twice to three times as much solar as you think you will need. Calculate about 35% of your panels in collected electricity. If you have a 200 watt panel figure your only going to get about 70 watts out of it best case for overcast days. I have 4, 48 volt banks of volt batteries giving me about 1100 amps. That sounds like a lot but it isn't. It is best to not run your batteries down any lower than you have to I prefer staying well above 50% which means if I am using battery I have to carefully manage my usage. No more leaving wall warts plugged in, no more using night lights or leaving any lights on all the time. All my lighting is now LED which has made a huge difference in usage but the freezers and A/C are the big energy hogs. I can do without A/C in summer but I need heat in Winter. I have a gas boiler, a forced air heat pump and two heat/cool mini splits. In the winter on battery power as long as there is natural gas I will use the boiler and just run the circulation pumps. If not super cold I will just run one mini-split at night.

If I had it to do all over again I would put more than the 36 panels I have and double my battery storage. I think 15KW would have been better than the 12 I have. But I usually don't have a bill above my minimum except in the hot summer A/C season.

One thing to realize that you never get what you put on the roof. You must figure a good 10% reduction in wiring losses. If you don't use battery backup you will have less loss than 10% but after ten years I have seen a reduction in what I can pull down. If it is a good day if I can get 10KW per hour or 60KW a day. If you have a battery you are only going to get about 90% of what you put in to the battery back out.

With plenty of sunshine I don't have to be stingy with usage but with overcast which is often the case in Kentucky in the winter I must be careful if using the battery instead of the grid.

I'm glad I have the solar, my monthly electricity cost are very low at both houses and I feel prepared if the you know what hits the fan and the grid is down for a long time.

There are a lot of things that are not cost effective, solar is one of them but to me security is worth the price of solar.

The picture below with the brown roof is in Kentucky, the house with the pool is in SW Florida where the sun always shines. I have added a few KW more panels since that picture of the Florida house was taken. We use a pool heater, although it is a heat pump heater it still uses a lot of electricity and I would rather generate it than pay for it.

Every situation is different. I have solar in two homes. In Kentucky I have battery backup in Florida I do not. In Florida the solar just offsets the cost of electricity, about 7 years does it for me to break even. In Kentucky it took about ten years to break even but I didn't get solar there to save money I did it to keep the power on. Kentucky is my base and I have a couple freezers full of food I would not like to lose. When I first installed I got a huge battery that would keep the A/C going in the Summer. The batteries were fine but I traveled a lot and didn't care for them properly and ruined them. I have since replaced them with carefree batteries but at only one third the capacity so that they will only run the A/C in the summer for two or three days if we don't have a lot of sun. So to offset that need I got a couple mini split units that provide A/C or heat and they are really efficient. Now I can run them as long as I want on battery power but the area cooled is only the kitchen dining room (about 800 sqft) and our bedroom.

During the last Hurricane down in Florida I saw so any of my neighbors with their refrigerators on the street taped shut because of the spoiled food. My solar didn't help that but I did also have a little generator, 5500 watts that kept my lights, refrigerator and cook stove running. I had to be careful for a week or so waiting for power to be restored, the biggest hassle was getting gasoline from filling stations that didn't have power.

Anyway, in Kentucky most months I don't pay anything for electricity except for the hookup charge which is about $25 a month. In Kentucky what overage I generate during the day comes back to me at night and at the end of the year they give me a credit and I start all over again. In Florida they simply buy my excess electricity at wholesale rate of about 2-1/2 cents, not worth the trouble of keeping up with it.

The advantage of battery backup of course is that when the grid is down you aren't. It's automatic and you never even realize it. I've had neighbors ask me when the power came back on because theirs wasn't but I didn't even know it went off.

I'm old and my wife is several years younger so I wanted monthly expenses to be as small as possible when I'm gone. I just lived longer than expected so that I get to enjoy those reduced monthly expenses too.

I really like my solar and am glad I have it. Electricity costs may go up but it won't affect me.

Pictures Ansel Adams would love to have been able to make.

I have sent a little fall picture taken with a low res camera that has been significantly cropped. It was taken with a drone, the DJI Mavic 3 Pro with the 24mm 20megapixel camera and then cropped. The second picture is the other side of the trees with the same camera. Fall makes for colorful images even with relatively simple equipment

Today we consider this equipment to be low budget simple consumer grade equipment. My point is that even with low cost "consumer" grade equipment the world of photography has advanced so much that even inexpensive equipment can tell a story or get an idea across. We can easily capture what the world looks like, it's really nice to be in this age.

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Ansel Adams work is thrown around a lot. While it is true he obviously had an "eye" for an interesting image and we have seen many of those images, we don't however have them in our homes today because many of us in this forum have or are learning to have just as good an eye. With a good eye today and even low cost equipment available today we can out perform Ansel Adams without breaking a sweat. We are not limited to a 50mm lens, we are not limited to the grain of low speed black and white film. I can take dramatic pictures that hold your attention with deep colors even in the shadows. I'm convinced that if Ansel Adams could be here today he would have a high priced digital camera as his workhorse.

Part of the allure of Ansel Adams was his venturing into the Great wide open American spaces in the west. If one of us were to post a picture identical to one of his we would be laughed off the site. Many of us have taken images from the same vantage point as the great Ansel Adams and have much more spectacular images, images that we are proud to display on the walls of our homes.

Photography has come a long way since Ansel Adams took the trouble to lug his equipment into the wilderness and show us what was there.

It is a little silly to not be impressed with what our modern photography equipment can do. Today anybody with even a modicum of talent for selecting a good photographic subject can create a memorable image using relatively inexpensive equipment that Ansel Adams would love to have had.

He isn't the first to say it, I say hogwash. You spend the extra money for FF to get high resolution, dynamic range and the ability to crop. If you are never going to crop then go to a cropped sensor, the lenses are cheaper as are the cameras. If you want great low light performance and the ability to do some serious cropping yo can't beat FF.

I have the the Tamron 150-600. That lens is great but with the 2X adapter it it soft and dark, I don't even keep the adapter in my case any more.

I've gotten rid of everything but the Nikon D850 and Nikon Z7. I used to keep old cameras around for backup but once I got the D850 I was done with using anything else, I was spoiled. The Z7 is similar in may ways to the D850 and while it will likely be in the car the D850 is the king of dslr's but like Elvis it is on the heavy side.

While I have dropped my cameras before they haven't needed repair, they just keep working. I was slow to go to the Z7 because of having only one card slot, but to be honest I've never lost an image on a card so I have just quit worrying about it.

I understand how some like to have two cameras with a different lens on each makes sense but not for me.

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The Nikon Z9 is the best camera today. Uncanny ability to focus at high speed. If you are into sports nobody beats the Z9 today. There is plenty of glass for the Z9, that is lenses that don't require an adapter.

I have a close friend that has the Z9 he can't believe how good it is. He used to shoot Canon, then Nikon. He moved up from D70 to D700 to D800 to D810 to D850 (best DSLR ever) to Z7 and now Z9. He says no comparison. They all three (850, Z7 and Z9) give similar images but the speed that the 9 does it is incredible. The focus is instantaneous. Up to 120 images a second and actually catching several images before and after you press the shutter release means you never have to miss the shot.

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As I have reached 75 I have also considered reducing weight. I'm a Nikon shooter and the last few years have been shooting with the best camera I have ever had in my hands, the Nikon D850. I shoot with the grip with a long lens it is heavy. Heavy is ok in the middle of the day with plenty of light but 600mm at dusk really requires a tripod. Don't get me wrong the D850 is a truly wonderful camera and can do most anything you ask of it. Recently however I got a Nikon Z7, it is light AND fits my huge hands very well. I like that there is almost no difference in picture dynamics between the two. I take them both out and compare and both are just great. The Z7 does not have all the bells and whistles but it sure takes a fine picture at a great weight savings and size savings. I can't get comfortable with the Sonys because of my large hands so to me the Z7 was the right answer not even to mention all the Nikon glass will work on it with the adapter. So, my recommendation is put the camera you are considering in your hands for a couple hours and see how you like the feel, nearly all FF's will give you a great picture but at our age being in the back country with a big rock that is hard to comfortably hold is not a good idea.

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New equipment of any brand will serve you well but, I have found that what has been most important to me is dynamic range. I have also found that Nikon is more advanced in dynamic range, you can expect 15 stops on the Z9. They both focus well, very well and you have to go to a lab to see which one has the slight edge. Both take continuous pictures for a long time although the Nikon seems to go on for ever. They are both big cameras but I really like the extra battery size in the Z9, it will last a couple hours or more in continuous video.

No matter which one you choose you will get great shots but when you screw up your exposure that dynamic range of the Nikon will come in very handy, you can turn a dud into a keeper.

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I'm an old guy, I've been shooting for 60+ years, ever since high school. I have graduated to a Nikon D850 and am thrilled with how good it makes me look. I also have been using a drone for the last ten or so years. While I have a few drones, my newest is the DJI Mavic 3 pro. I have lost drones, it's not a good day when that happens. I have found that they don't work well under water or in the rain. I have spent plenty getting them repaired and plenty buying them but they can give you some really spectacular pictures. If you really want to try drones I would suggest that you try a drone with a camera that has a larger sensor than the average drone has. Something like the DJI Phantom 4 Pro or the Mavic 2 pro. Each of them have the 1" 20 megapixel camera and give pretty fair dynamic range. Both of those drones can be had on the used market pretty cheap if you consider $700 or $800 cheap. The DJI Air 2S also has a 1 inch sensor, it is 20 megapixel with pretty good dynamic range and shoots RAW as do both of the other drones I named. The 2S is going to be hard to find on the used market, it is really well liked but they only cost $999.00 brand new for the basic kit. I recently upgraded to the DJI Mavic 3 pro which has a slightly larger camera that has very nice dynamic range plus has three different cameras. The main camera is a Hasselblad 4/3rds and is really nice, the second which is a mid range telephoto lens while having the capability to shoot in 48Megapixel mode is not as nice a camera as the main camera but does pretty well and there is a third camera that shoots at 166mm for a pretty long telephoto. If you are good at using Lightroom or any other variant of software that has a camera RAW editor then you can get a lot from any of the drones I just listed. I have tried to attach pictures but the system doesn't seem to be working, they are remarkable. As I have gotten old it is much more difficult to get shots I used to be able to climb around to, now my drones do the climbing. I take at least as many drone pictures now as I do on my 850. The drone can't match the 850 but they are good. I highly recommend you get a drone with a good camera, you will get shots you could only have imagined before.

I carry an S22 Ultra and admit it's impressive for a phone but not on par with my cameras.

For the last 3 years for the first time in my life I have only one camera. (That's not counting drones, I also shoot with a Phantom 4 pro and a Mavic 3 pro) I have always had multiple cameras but within a couple of months after buying my Nikon D850 I realized I would never shoot with any of my old equipment and got rid of all of it including late model d8x's.

I've been reading about how wonderful the Z8 is, perhaps it will lure me in, perhaps. I have been really amazed by the D850. Once on a trip to Arches National Park with my D810, a truly great camera, I saw a German photographer and asked about what he was using and he showed me his D850 which was pretty new back then. I couldn't imagine getting better shots with the D850 than the D810 so I kind of rolled my eyes, he told me that after I got a D850 I would throw rocks at my 810. Well, I never threw rocks at it but I certainly never used it again so I got rid of it and my 800.

I've been shooting for over 60 years, nothing has ever impressed me like the D850. I had a Beseler enlarger once that I was in love with but not like the D850. It's all about dynamic range and nothing does it like the 850.