Andrew Garrard

I believe the theory is that it's helpful to be able to cover at least 90 degrees, because then you can put the camera in the corner of a room and capture both the walls you're next to - ideally a little more than 90 degrees, because you really want to be standing behind the camera, so there's an offset (and you want to see the adjacent walls). With the camera in landscape orientation, that's a focal length of half the sensor width, so 12mm for DX and 18mm for FX is slightly too long. I've been known to use a 14mm on FX to capture a large room in which an event was happening, on the same basis. (I've also used an 8mm fish-eye, although for real-estate the distortion of straight lines would probably be a bit unhelpful.) I think you might need a slightly less-wide lens if you stuck it against the ceiling and pointed it down a bit (so it was in the corner of the room in three dimensions rather than two), instead of keeping it horizontal, but I'm not awake enough yet to do geometry. :-) I can see that might not be a useful aesthetic choice either - at least with a horizontal corner view you can take the photo from head height. Or you can stand in the middle of the room and stitch a spherical panorama (easy with your average phone), which is an approach I've also been known to use when nothing's moving. It does take longer, though.

The infrared-converted D90 I picked up in 2018 is the same sensor as the D300 (wrapped in a less professional body). I've occasionally tried to zoom into an image and wondered where the extra pixels were, and it's got quite a strong AA filter, but both those complaints could be levelled against the D700 I happily used for a long time. I'd be a little more wary of exposing for the highlights and being able to lift the shadows than on the D7000 and later, and I'd get a bit scared much above ISO 3200, but with half-decent lighting (still worlds more lenient than Velvia) it's perfectly respectable. This reminds me, I should take that D90 out while the weather is nice and that IR sensor is doing anything useful...

FWIW, Helicon have (had?) a component HeliconRemote that will drive an AF lens through stacking operations. You can plug your phone in and drive the camera from that. It can also drive some powered macro rails, which appear to be getting more affordable than when I first looked. I believe Helicon at least can also generate a 3D image map from the focus stack and use it to let you rotate the image model (although obviously you can't reveal obscured detail). Other than a brief experiment a couple of years ago, I've not really tried them, though. With my recent stacks I didn't use the D850's stacking feature - partly because everything was moving in the wind and I figured I could get a stack just from that motion, and partly because I was using my manual Laowa. I should really experiment, especially while we're still (somewhat) locked down. Although I should go and get some exercise photographic grebes, too...

Yes, I was going to say that I'd foolishly assume that Nikon might have put some electronics in their batteries beyond just welding some 18650s in some plastic. If there's some battery lifetime monitoring management (or, in Nikon's case, a pointless attempt to block third-party accessories), it might be sensitive. I assumed BeBu's "dummy battery" was trying to retain any such electronics and not just the physical attachments. How smart the smart battery has to be is another matter - and in the vintage of the D1x there may be less cleverness than in recent systems which at least try to track age.

Ken Rockwell quoth: Non-AI, Pre-AI (also called NAI) refers to the original Nikon F bayonet lens mount and lenses introduced in 1959 for the Nikon F camera. I think I only picked it up when I saw someone else using it around here. But if "NAI" is causing ambiguity, I'll steer clear. I often say "pre-AI", but obviously it's marginally less concise. I'm a little wary of "pre-AF" as a catch-all for so long as Nikon theoretically still sell the manual 50mm f/1.2 (not that I've checked recently). Good thing we all know what we're referring to...

Agreed (and used regularly, so long as you can work out what the term you're searching for is). It's one of the things which tends to get ignored by people offering chunked web pages as an alternative. (Nikon's one for the D850 does have a search at least, but I wouldn't say it's any more convenient.)

Nice image. Pedantically, I believe Sigma make a f/2.8 180mm Macro (which is a lot bigger and heavier than the 150mm), and Tamron make a 180mm f/3.5 macro which might be AF-S. Actually, I say "make". They all seem to be discontinued, which I'd not realised. More pressure on Nikon to update the 200 f/4 (and arguably 70-180mm). I'll treat my 150mm more carefully... I'll just re-state my issues with rolling shutter and focus stacking: if the subject or photographer are wobbling in the breeze, it doesn't just move the subject, it distorts it. I'd not realised how pronounced this was until I tried to stack: for stills, I've been known to capture bursts with an electronic shutter and hope that the focal plane crosses the subject when I'm wobbling hand-held, but when I tried to stack the result, different parts of the image were distorted to different extents as they moved across the frame. I don't know of stacking software that will fix this (although it's certainly possible). The problem is much less significant with the mechanical shutter because it crosses the frame faster than the image read-out - at least until we get global shutter sensors back. Of course it's irrelevant if you're using a tripod and the subject holds still. :-) Good luck, and I look forward to the stack!

To be fair to Nikon for once in all my ranting, you're quite right. :-) It would, of course, have been nice if they'd used some of the long sequence of letters in each lens to indicate truly orthogonal concepts so that we didn't have to reverse-engineer everything and then list the exceptions to whatever rule seemed to make sense. AI-P lenses were early enough that "electronic maximum aperture" would have been easy enough. On the other hand, I believe there's no obvious way to distinguish E aperture lenses which have a manual override (the first few PC-E) from the 19mm, which doesn't (I think); there's no obvious naming to suggest that the 70-300 FX has AF-P that's compatible with AF-S but the DX versions don't, and I still don't really understand why dSLRs can't control AI-S lens apertures in the same way that they do AI-P lenses... Oops, it's been a while. Having a "day/date" window is one of the "five" for which the Seiko 5 is named. Which doesn't stop you being able to select the option on the Seiko site and have no effect if you've already requested to look at Seiko 5s. I actually owe an apology (although probably not to every other watch site I looked at a few years ago, including many manufacturers); Searchable Seiko 5 Catalog actually does let you exclude features. Yay for third parties with imagination. Mine barely gets used, since I'm normally a smart watch person (RIP Pebble, or at least when the battery dies on mine RIP), but it's nice to have a mechanical option. I got enough into watches to appreciate some features, but stopped short of diverting my NAS money. Just as well, since a Patek would pay for the entire set of big Nikon superteles. (If you ever visit Taipei 101, the shopping centre floors contain increasingly preposterous watch retailers. Rolex is on the ground floor.) There are a number of mostly budget Canon lenses that didn't get the ultrasonic motor (USM) - the 50mm f/1.8 being a prime example (hoho). Canon didn't feel the need to indicate that the lenses were autofocus once you'd gone to the Eos mount, of course; something other than "S" in "AF-S" would have been better for Nikon, I feel (maybe "AF-E" - autofocus-electronic?), leaving the SWM branding alone. Canon also seem to have done a better job of compatibility with the STM stepper motors. Given that the FX 70-300 seems to be able to pull the "AF-P but looks like AF-S" trick, I'm curious whether it just has two protocols (and actually behaves differently depending on the body) or whether there's some subtlety that makes the other AF-P lenses incompatible.

There's a lesson in technology naming - it's very hard to search for something that isn't there. (Aside: Some people tend to "un-invent the number 0". A while back I was trying to buy a Seiko 5 watch, of which there are hundreds of variants, and I wanted one without a day read-out. In lots of watch finding solutions you can pick all the ones with the day read-out, or look at everything; in most cases you can't exclude an option. This seems to be a mentality thing.) Back on topic, looking for an AF lens that's not AF-D/AF-I/AF-S/AF-P is hard to do; it would be nice if companies would plan ahead better for this kind of thing (as opposed to managing to have AF-S clash between "single-servo AF" and "autofocus with a Silent Wave Motor®" or have "E" mean "electronic aperture" or "cheap line of lenses we're not calling Nikkor"). We've (kind of) got the "NAI" convention for "not AI", but I've not really seen a good way of saying "AF-not-D" except by hoping people are paying attention. There's enough trouble the "electronic lenses", which are the autofocus ones, but also the AI-P ones, but also the PC-E lenses that are for some reason not labelled AI-P. I can vaguely see how the N2020/F501 in 1987 could have ended up without the electronic support for AF-S/AF-I autofocus, even though the F4 worked just fine (for a 1980s AF system) by 1988. I'm less clear how the N55/F55 made the same design decision in 2002, four years after the first AF-S lens and ten years after the first AF-I. I'm curious whether there was a good technical reason - I wondered if it was a voltage limitation on the batteries, but the N75/F75 seemed to cope. And yes, I believe Nikon have never made a full-frame body without a screwdriver AF system (or aperture following ring), until the Z series and the FT-Z. I still think there was a place for a cost- and weight-reduced dSLR below the D600, with no screwdriver, no aperture following ring, and a pentamirror (which in a larger FX viewfinder isn't all that bad compared with a DX pentaprism). The time has passed - or rather, they did it, but lopped off the mirror as well.

To be fair, I'm not particularly picking on Nikon's software team. I've heard historical complaints about the stability of some Nikon software, but I wouldn't let Canon software on my computer either, and I don't install mouse drivers when I can avoid it; I've never used the Nikon software, so I haven't had a bad experience. There was (is?) a fixation over producing mobile (and PC) apps to do something that you can do perfectly well with a web page or other software, and the companies responsible for web browsers and PDF readers or whose entire business model is based around image editing software are much more equipped and motivated to do these well. Apps, especially poorly-maintained ones, are much more likely to be a security risk, have user interface inconsistencies, and become outdated - and any functionality that relies on an app would typically be better served by allowing capitalism to motivate improvements as competing companies fight for users. It's just not the right solution for a company whose focus should be elsewhere to be trying to do something that requires substantial investment and expertise, especially when other companies are willing to do the work for them. It's not just camera companies - a lot of online services have an app which is of limited benefit (and don't get me started on the time I downloaded a 50MB printer driver over a 9600baud mobile phone connection and IrDA; it was 50MB because the driver was full of installation images - the actual functionality was tiny). Picking a popular one, of those using a Zoom app on a PC or Mac during lockdown, has anyone noticed it saturate a CPU when someone else is screen sharing? (All the fans spin up, my MacBook gets painful to touch. Apparently this applies to Windows too.) The web browser interface doesn't do that, at least to the same extent. I have a suspicion that something might be trying to update the screen as fast as possible: web browsers are written not to cripple the computer when someone's badly-written JavaScript app tries to hog all the CPU cycles (I'm not a huge fan of JavaScript, but providing an interface which idiots can use to write bad code has done wonders for motivating web browser authors to be resilient against it). It might be something else to blame. So I'm sure the Nikon manual browsing app is great. It probably even works, since it's not that hard to render a PDF, especially if they're just using existing services to do it (hopefully not a random PDF renderer library downloaded off the internet and repurposed). It's possible that it has a wide range of useful additional features, but until Nikon tells me what they are, I'm inclined to ignore the hard and I'm sure dispiriting work of whichever team put it together, despite my solidarity with software developers. There needs to be a clear benefit to installing a proprietary app - because there are definitely disadvantages. On the plus side, at least the manual is available as a PDF. I'd just rather Nikon software developers with time on their hands went through the list of things that could be added to the firmware instead.

I too have the pdf manuals for my camera on my phone. There is indeed some proprietary Nikon software viewer, but given the choice of something slapped together by a camera company and one of the existing perfectly serviceable ways of reading a PDF already installed (and fully maintained by companies who actually have engineering expertise in this kind of thing), I'm not inclined to let the Nikon software on my system. If you're comparing, some of the older pdf manuals don't always cross link properly, so you may have to find pages directly; newer ones are better. The latest bodies have an online chunked html manual as well, which is nice, but no use if you're in the middle of Yellowstone with no reception; it doesn't currently add much, although maybe Nikon plan some more dynamic content in the future which justifies it. I find reading the manual before buying to be useful (Nikon at one point blocked you from doing this, then came to their senses); it's a much more reliable way of describing how things work than most launch marketing fluff. I don't necessarily remember if all, especially if I'm comparing across bodies. Thom Hogan's guides seem well-received; I only have the D850 one, and it's certainly not perfect, but it's pretty good, and he covers a lot of cameras - if you'd like another source than Nikon. The manuals don't really have a very exhaustive index, sadly - certainly not when it comes to synonyms for a feature. If you're just trying to look up a solution, they may be less useful, because you won't know what to search for. The same applies to the interactive help in the menu system. Better that it's there than not, though. Enjoy the reading. :-)

Hmm. DxOMark seem to have got a good copy (at least stopped down a bit). OpticalLimits is indeed a bit damning, and Thom Hogan didn't like it either. Bjorn quite likes it, but only tested it on DX. Ken Rockwell didn't like it, and I thought he liked everything. Also it's a bit heavier than the 24-85 VR. I get the impression that it's a bit like the 70-200 VR1 or the pre-Art 50mm Sigma: highly optimised for the DX image circle because that was what dSLRs looked like at the time. I'm a bit hesitant about the edges of the frame on FX, although the 24-85 VR seems to be weakest at the wide end too.

Of course, it's another reason to decide that mid-range focal lengths are boring, and stick to the ultrawides and the telephotos. :-) I'd be paying a lot more attention if there really was an exceptional candidate; instead I'm looking more at getting a 24-85 as a minimalist lightweight option and accepting the optical compromise when I use it.

At 8' and a small subject, you may well have something that's too small for the AF point to lock onto, and that would be while the focus is close - if the AF goes some distance away, all it will see is blur. Like others, I've just made sure I have the focal plane in the right area, then shot bursts with the focus disabled until the subject hit the focal plane. You may want bursts to time the wing position anyway. At least a fairly stationary subject helps - I've had a miserable time chasing flying dragonflies and even butterflies against a busy background, and even getting a swarm of gnats that were perfectly backlit with a 300/4 was quite challenging. In theory there ought to be a chance that trap focus may help, but for some reason I believe it's only an option with a single focus point, and even then I'd certainly not bet on it with a small, fast subject. Good luck. :-)

Yes. There seem to be mixed review on whether the Sigma is better. I certainly see the benefit in dropping to f/4 or so on the Tamron, but I like having f/2.8 when I need it - I'm more likely to need f/2.8 to be sharp in the centre (or close to it depending on composition), whereas for landscape where I want sharp edges, I'll stop down. I generally prefer that it's sharp at the wider end - at the longer end I've got the 70-200 and prime options which are sharper anyway. At the wider end, if it weren't for this, I'd be using the 14-24 - and I almost always shoot that around f/6.3-7.1 just to rein in the field curvature, at least for landscapes. (Sadly the 19mm T/S is vying with the 500mm PF and a third of a 400mm f/2.8 for "lenses I'd have if I had a spare £3500".) Unlike the recent 70-200 lenses, I don't think there's any such thing as a "really good across the whole frame at a wide aperture" mid-range zoom - it's famously hard to make something behave nicely as it goes from retrofocal to telephoto. All of the 24-70 options have taken advantage of more modern optical design (I'm sure the computer involvement has improved since the 28-70 and definitely 35-70), although of course the extra wide-angle flexibility counters that a little. Most of the time, they're all fine. None of them is match for the 50mm Sigma Art, let alone the 40mm. Historically, lens design tends to come in waves (he says with a relatively limited photographic background compared with many on the forum): there was a time when everybody's 70-300mm suddenly got much better, a time when Zeiss and Sigma suddenly stepped up the 55/50mm game, a time when the 70-200 game moved on (with the 70-200FL and the Tamron G2, and I assume now with the Sigma), and they were all a big step ahead of the previous generation. Nikon and Canon were busy leapfrogging each other for the 24-70 crown, and they have improved (mostly - the non-VR vs VR 24-70 is debatable, and Nikon publicly said they chose a non-VR 24-70 first because of concerns about image quality). I'm still waiting for the "as good as a prime" 24-70 lens to appear. With mirrorless (and the ability to correct the wide angle end nearer to the sensor), we'll probably never see it in F-mount: Nikon would rather people went to Z mount to solve the problem than try to fix it with one hand tied behind their backs.

Sounds like you want the Sigma 24-35 f/2 then. :-)

Agreed that the 200/2 will lose the background better, which is valuable to me (even though mine is the older one and a little less contrasty wide open than the mk2 - so I have half an eye on any updates). The 70-200 FL is, however, a lens that I'm happy to shoot at f/2.8 - it's only losing one stop, whereas the 70-200 VR2 I was often at f/4 and two stops down.

To add to the voices... I've hired a mk1 24-70 Nikkor for a wedding. It was a bit inconveniently big (and I've had a 14-24 almost as long as I've shot Nikon). I'd certainly hesitate to carry it around. The 24-70 VR is even bigger. For a long time I avoided a mid-range zoom - I had a 28-200 that I often used at either end, although it didn't hold up on a D8x0, and I have an old 28-80 that only really gets used for video. When the Brexit vote tanked the exchange rate, I bought a 24-120 f/4 and the Tamron 24-70 VC (G1) before the prices went up. The Tamron is almost as small as the 24-120 and, to my mind, clearly better in addition to being a stop faster. I've since got rid of the 24-120, but the 24-70 gets quite a lot of use (enough that I have some 82mm filters almost exclusively for it). The G2 would at least have the dock. I've not resorted to tuning the AF, although I do drop a stop or two when I can anyway. (I tend to try not to go as low as f/8 because of diffraction and possible sensor dust, though.) If the bulk of the Nikkor makes you hesitate, the Tamron is a lot less unwieldy, arguably better optically depending on where you look (although I'd take a slight improvement if offered - the G2 has the same optics, and I although the Sigma may be a little better, it's not by much) and a lot less money. I'm happy with mine. I believe the consensus is that the 28-70 zooms were visibly worse (lens technology moved on).

Just confirming, setting the flash to manual (custom e2) let things work on my D90 (with an E-series 50mm). TTL flash doesn't work, but then without an aperture following ring the camera has no way to know what the shooting aperture is going to be, so that's probably to be expected. I don't think I had to do anything to make this option visible. It's a little harsh to criticise Nikon for a menu system on a body discontinued in 2008 and since redesigned - the D90 one seems fairly familiar to me compared with my usual D8x0 bodies. That said, I'd much rather have more configurability available, and have some of the unnecessary features hidden (but obvious that something's there...) so you don't have to scroll through all of them. Picking a subset of functionality according to what Nikon engineers happened to think was a good idea has not universally been a blessing. (I don't actually find the menus on my RX100 all that bad, but there's certainly a lot of scrolling.)

Possible, but then it's also possible that the D7x00 line would then not have appeared or been as capable - with the arguably case of the D7500 being pushed down in a few features in its market positioning (mostly the mount compatibility) compared with the D7200 in order to make room for the D500 above it. I don't know how much the earthquake really messed with things, but I always suspected the D500 appeared mostly because the 7DII appeared - although late enough after it that Nikon may for once not have known what Canon was doing until they'd done it. Canon haven't done a 7DIII (yet), so I'm not holding my breath. That said, niggles with the 3D tracking point acquisition aside, I'll be interested to see how much better the D6 AF sensor really is. Any form of eye tracking may be interesting, but for my uses I'm not that unhappy with what I've got.

That may be true, but on the other hand a Z50 is no D500 (and arguably not a D7500). There will be some things it does better, but there are definitely things it does worse - much as with the Z7 vs D850. I've no objection to going to mirrorless if I don't lose too much functionality and gain something by doing so, but with the first iteration of cameras that's not the case - but they have to hit a given market position, so probably we shouldn't expect them to do better than other available dSLRs, except that we'd expect the Z series to be cheaper to make and we might hope that this would allow some realigning. I can understand Nikon not wanting to invest in another round of dSLR upgrades, but the reason I with they'd sell me some firmware (or give it to me if someone else will pay the development cost) is that I expect it to be a while before we get back where we were. It happened before. Lots of complaints about the D800 not being a true D700 replacement (mostly because it couldn't do 8fps from AAs and there's a small but detectable gap between 4fps and 5fps full frame - though I'd claim the D800 in 1.2x crop and 5fps is a decent approximation). The D810 got 5fps back. With the D850 we got a 9fps with grip body that's back to being a poor man's D5 (although it has many more selling points compared with the way a D700 stacks up to the D3). And so history repeats.

My 70-200 spends a moderate amount of its time hung upside down from its foot as a handle. Or sometimes the right way up - I often point the foot to the direction of the prism, because then my hand is relatively unimpeded for supporting the lens but it still works as a handle. Tiddlywinks involves too much jumping to one side when someone rotates their shooting position and someone walks in the way - I'll sit on the far side of a room, but I need to leap up sometimes, and either I or someone else would trip over a monopod. I'm not normally static enough to justify the weight when I'm out walking/wildlifing, and if I'm near a car I can just use a tripod. But I appreciate monopods have their uses, I just tend not to hit them...

That's impressive. I was curious, and Tiffen have a database of lens filter sizes... and out of 1790 lenses, none of them take a 64mm thread. :-) The best I could do was find an ebay listing showing a 64mm filter for a Sony 16-50, but that lens doesn't take 64mm filters. If you find something it fits on, I'll be entertained.

Or 86mm for the Sigma 85mm... I have one expensive 82mm filter (Hoya variable density) that gets used on my Tamron 24-70 - a size that admittedly Nikon have gone to as well for the 24-70 line. I have an IDAS D1 LPR filter (more useful for astronomy before my council changed from sodium lighting to LEDs) in 77mm, which fits the 300mm f/4 and my 70-200; I had a plan to use it on my 24-120 and Sigma 50mm as well; unfortunately having traded the 24-120 and swapped the 50mm for a 40mm (with an 82mm thread) I'm a bit more restricted for meteor showers. I also have a stronger LPS V4 nebula filter which I carefully bought a 200/4 AI for, since you can't get it in larger than a 52mm filter - and then remembered that my 200/2 has 52mm rear drop-in filters; I've yet to give that a try... I'm still hopeful that someone will eventually sell an inverse bullseye apodising filter in a sensible size that I can afford, but they don't seem to be common yet. (Aside: Nikon UK's web site has a series of recommended categories for lenses, and I notice the 200/2 isn't in any of them. It's not actually listed as discontinued yet, though.) Filters are annoying. I also have more than one budget polariser for a 62mm filter thread, which I think nothing I've owned uses except the 28-200mm which I no longer have. These days I mostly look out for very large filter sizes on primes in the hope that it's an indication that there'll be less mechanical vignetting - like the Sigma 105mm f/1.4, which is free of cats' eyes by f/2 (and is the main hesitation I have about the Nikkor). You'll probably get used to carrying a 70-200. I felt it when I'd not carried my camera for a while, and it's certainly not like carrying an RX100, but it's not ridiculously heavy (compared with, say, a 120-300), and we should all be getting some exercise in the current climate - just don't try to mount a 70-200 and then hang the camera around your neck. I find I just trip over monopods, and by the time I've carried them around as well it's more effort than just carrying the lens - but it depends whether you tend to walk for a bit and then stick in one place. They do double as walking sticks though! I'm rambling, and not in the way that results in wildlife photos, so I'm going to shut up. But enjoy the toy!

The EX series weren't too bad in my experience. The non-EX consumer brand were pretty awful. My 150mm macro is an EX, and it's fine (and certainly better than the 105mm Nikkor). I'm still happy with my 8mm fish-eye - which was probably the best available 8mm at least until the Nikkor fisheye zoom appeared. The pre-Art 50mm had corners of vaseline in full frame, but on a DX sensor it behaved at least as well as the Nikkor AF-S and had better bokeh and lower LoCA, as I recall. It was also more expensive than the Nikkor. :-)