Andrew Garrard

I'll type all of that again now I've turned off the accidental "go back a page and forget everything" trackpad gesture on my Mac. Sigh. According to Nikon (and Tamron): The Nikkor AF-S 70-200 VR2 will get you to 0.12x (1:8.3) at 1.4m The Tamron 70-200 G2 will get you to 1:6.1 (0.16x) at 0.95m The Nikkor 70-200 FL will get you to 0.21x (1:4.8) at 1.1m, so although it doesn't focus as close as the Tamron it retains its focal length better - that matters for me for tiddlywinks, and is reasonably okay for some insects The Nikkor 300mm f/4 AF-S will get you to 1:3.7 (0.27x) at 1.45m - which is why it's a good insecting lens The Nikkor 300mm f/4 PF will get you to 0.24x (1:4.2) at 1.4m - I knew there was a reason not to upgrade The Nikkor 200/2 (VRII) will get you to 0.12x (1:8.3) at 6.1' (1.9m) away - which is annoying indoors, although it also shows how much less focal length it loses than the 70-200 VR2 at the same magnification I've never used a 70-200 mk1, but I saw pictures, and the corners at 200mm (on FX) looked like mush even stopped down. Mind you, I don't like what the 85mm AF-D f/1.4 did wide open either, so there's no accounting for taste. While I found it helped to stop down to f/4, I didn't feel the VR2 was that bad (although it's reported it's worse at 135mm than 70 or 200); the FL is just clearly better. I'm choosing not to look at the Tamron and Sigma because I've already spent that money (and only just paid off my D850...)

If anyone's not heard the rant before, the thing that put me off keeping a previous generation body alive was the swap of the +/- buttons in image review - as someone who chimps my photos a lot, having "smaller" above "bigger" on the D700 (and D300) and the other way around on the D8x0 bodies drove me nuts, because I'd always go the wrong way. It's one of the few things you can't configure. The D3's "hold and zoom with the dials" approach always seemed more sensible to me, if only because it doesn't waste a button (albeit one I can't reach anyway...) and probably wouldn't annoy me in the same way; the D4 and D5 followed the D800 design, for some reason. Oddly, not a disconnect I've had with my F5. :-) I've only briefly handled a single-digit Nikon body. I do like them, although I'd probably grumble about the lack of flash (a little less seriously than with my D850). While I'm glad to have the full 45MP sometimes, 12MP certainly captures the scene well enough for a lot of uses, unless you have a very big print in mind or you're doing a lot of digital zooming (in which case you can always use more). Having got used to the grip on my D850, there's something to be said for higher frame rates (without burning through £5/second like you can with the F5) - but I like having a lighter option for general use, even if I spoil it by having an L-plate on it the whole time. Plus the big bodies are always handy if you need a weapon or want to hammer in a nail.

Both my Art lenses and my other Sigmas have similar "for Nikon" branding on the body cap, as does my Tamron 24-70 (with a brand name substitute, obviously). Not that they specify "F mount" of course, which may cause them difficulties in the new mirrorless era, as Shun suggests. On the other hand, I do have a selection of replacement rear lens caps that have no branding on them at all (including my recent acquisitions with release pins) - and at least one simple push-fit one that might go on more than one mount if you tried. Since lens caps are easy to lose and there's a market in selling replacements, I wouldn't be surprised if a used one happened to have less helpful labelling. Unfortunately, labelling the mount itself is a bit difficult (it kind of has to be shiny metal to give a smooth and flat fit) and you don't see much of it under a cap anyway - plus hopefully if someone's looked at the mount, they'll know what they're looking at. There isn't much visible in front of the mount on a third-party lens that's mount-specific in which to put a helpful label. Even with all that, though, it's always possible to put the wrong thing in the wrong box. Mistakes happen; I hope it gets sorted out.

I did it the expensive way. I got a cheap 80-200 AF (mk1, push zoom), which was incredibly slow to focus (as reported) but also had something wrong with its aperture. Sadly because I didn't use it much I didn't notice until after I felt I could return it to the company which sold it to me. I then bought a new 80-200 AF-D mk3 (in Australia - they weren't available in the UK for some reason), in part so family could shoot my wedding with it. Even when I bought it, on a D700, it was visibly softer than a 70-200 VR2 in tests, but also a lot cheaper. At range I was okay with it, but at vaguely close distance it would miss focus a lot (I understand the telecentricity changes) and I'm not convinced it was all that sharp even if it was in focus, at close range - by which I mean useful portrait distance. I tried to throw more good money after bad and pick up a (rare in the UK) 80-200 AF-S, but when I went to collect it, it had aperture issues as well, so I got a 70-200 VR 2. I skipped the VR 1 because I shoot FX, and the corners of the VR 1 are famously iffy at 200mm - on a DX body I don't believe there's anything wrong with it. It was much better, but also clearly sharper at f/4 than at f/2.8, especially on a D8x0 body. Also the VR wasn't very good. I finally swapped for the FL lens (the Tamron G2 was allegedly about as good - the Sigma wasn't out at that point - but the Nikkor gave me better magnification; IIRC the Tamron actually focusses closer, but loses more focal length as you do so), and have essentially no complaints (other than the swapped rings, which mean I have to take the hood out of storage position to zoom) - which means the S-mount version must be pretty special. This is all after I'd avoided the 70-200 zooms for a long time, having already got (at one point) a 135 f/2 and (still) a 200/2 and 150mm f/2.8 macro covering the range. The FL lens, at least, is probably better than the 150mm at useful distances, gets pretty close, is much lighter than the 200mm, is finally usable at f/2.8, and caused me way less pain (except financially) than the 135mm. All of which shows what happens when I don't follow my "just buy the expensive thing in the first place" philosophy, any why my credit card company likes me.

I can report that the 300 f/4 AF-S is reasonably fast to focus on a static subject (on a D8x0), but I've tried to follow birds in flight and had it not keep up. At least some of that will have been operator error, it's never an easy thing to do with small birds moving erratically. Vs a screwdriver lens... faster than an 80-200 mk1 (possibly than all of them), slower than a 28-80G. :-) If you're just trying to get to bird before they move, rather than tracking anything in motion, it's likely fine. I've been happy, usually close to wide open. I might not rule out the latest 70-300 AF-P (although I don't recall whether the D3s likes it).

I traded some other lenses and some money for the FL a while back - following my "never wonder what you could have had" philosophy that leaves me with no cash. It's a visible step up from the VR2, especially wide open - not that the VR2 was bad. The VR is a lot better, too. Reports are that the Z mount version is even better, for those going down that route. (Is it out yet?) Enjoy your new toy!

I've also had a 300/4 AF-S for some time (before recent times, it with a TC14 and the 500 f/4 AI-P were vying for the most practical budget way to get past 400mm). It's never squeaked (squoken?) but it's certainly not fast to focus - I too have struggled to follow birds with it. I slightly miss VR for composing hand-held with it; it does get nice and close if you're finding insects, though. It's about the size of a 70-200, and I've been known to take it on trips when I can't be bothered to take the 200-500. Also the tripod foot on the 300/4 AF-S is famously iffy. Currently I've made it even heavier but slightly more stable by using a long lens support, then overloading an astro mount (its filter size being about as big as I could be bothered to buy a light pollution cut filter). I've heard only bad things about the AF speed of the AF-I lenses (except possibly the 400mm) and the AF-D supertelephotos - although a D3s might do better than most. I don't think the f/2.8 glass and the 300mm f/4 PF are for the same target. I wouldn't want to hold a 300 f/2.8 for long without additional support, especially without VR - and I'm okay with my 200/2 and can, for short periods, use a 400 f/2.8. The PF is a very portable lens, on the other hand. If you think you want one, having an f/2.8 and leaving it at home won't be a good choice. Good luck with either route, though.

I was a bit confused at how the new screwdriver that apparently leaks oil and has a ribbed metal exterior rather than a rubber one is better suited for disassembling optics. But I own too many screwdrivers (for the amount I use them). There are plenty of Nikons which don't hold the selected aperture in live view/DoF preview as you zoom, although I don't know how many don't have this with E lenses. Otherwise, an aperture change on zoom doesn't bother me as it might have with a mechanical aperture ring, so long as the long end is fast enough. One thing that put me off a 200-400 f/4 is the argument that my 200 f/2 could deliver 400 f/4 with a TC, and the 200-400 is on the big side for a 200 f/4. But then the 200-500 f/5.6 is inexplicably bigger than my 200 f/4 too...

The F801 has a gotcha that it won't autofocus with AF-S lenses (i.e. anything remotely modern) - for some reason Nikon managed to end up with some bodies that can only use autofocus with screw drive lenses (F801/F601/F501/F401s/F60/F55) and some that can focus electronic lenses but not screw drive ones (low-end dSLRs). That would put me off buying one, but also makes them cheaper. The F80's lack of AI follower so you can't meter with manual lenses might be an issue if you're trying to go for an authentic budget lens experience. If you're prepared to import it from Japan, a used F100 might be manageable and certainly counts as a "really good Nikon". If you're lucky, you might find an F5 that's affordable, but I can vouch for them being a bit bulky to use; they're nothing like as refined as a modern dSLR, but then they're lacking twenty years of tweaking. (The F6 is probably better, but silly money.) Otherwise it's a game of "pick your compromise". The F75 is a lot cheaper, and basically the film equivalent of a D3x00 series dSLR (small, light, plastic, only one dial, no old lens compatibility). That's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's otherwise relatively modern - I've never used one, but I've been sorely tempted as a backup. (I have an Eos 500, which is close to Canon's equivalent.) I'm sure the F80 handles better, at the cost of being bigger and heavier, and I don't know how much that'll bother you. Before skimping too much, I'll point out how much film and film processing costs these days. It's a bit like inkjet printers - the up front cost of a film camera is reasonable, but by the time you've bought a few rolls of film, got them developed, and scanned them (depending on how much of that you're willing to do yourself), it's painful, which is why I have a load of out of date film in my fridge. A quick look online puts Velvia 50 at about 50p/frame to buy, another 15-20p to get developed, add a bit more to scan it... call it 75p/frame or, rounding down a lot, £25 per roll. Two rolls of Velvia is easily the price difference between an F75 and F80. 6 rolls would get you an F100 from Japan (maybe 15 from somewhere local), which might give you better use of cheap old lenses if you wanted them. Of course, 15 rolls of Velvia in, you could have bought a D7000 and shot as much as you liked digitally. So... I assume you're shooting film because you explicitly want to. But I'm just pointing out that going for the cheapest option isn't all that relevant in the long term. :-)

Yes - the supported list is in the link I gave. Although Sigma call it "Gloab vision" in their table, which presumably says something bad about their vision. :-) I'd be stuck if I wanted to swap my 150mm OS Macro, for example - but if they were going to charge me $380 to do it, I might be able to do a trade-in for one in another mount for less.

The close focus distance on fast lenses is often limiting (taking the 200/2 as a case in point), but a 400mm macro might be overkill. Not that I'm against long macros in principle. If you're using a big telephoto, it's presumably because you wanted to resolve detail. (Okay, I sometimes do it to lose the background, but the 200mm is the smallest "big telephoto" and is weird.) Otherwise you could just use a shorter lens and zoom in. I think Ilkka was pushing back (on handling). I'm reasonably sure that were I to win the lottery (which I don't enter), I'd be happy with the 500mm PF/400mm FL/800mm FL triplet, along with the 19mm PC obviously - I don't really see the need for a 180-400 or 120-300 myself. That said, I've been at the back of a conference room trying to photograph colleagues on stage and thought a fast 120-300 would have helped a bit (70-200 has been short, and I need speed for the lighting) - but I don't really imagine ever having so much money that I wouldn't find a better use for it than solving that problem (and hiring someone to carry it). Maybe I should eventually upgrade my 300mm f/4 to the PF... I'll happily rip a shorter lens to shreds on the basis of its LoCA rather than absolute sharpness, but since the longer lenses tend to be reasonably corrected for that and are on the slower end of the relative aperture range anyway, it's not usually the biggest crime. I've heard good things about the bokeh of this zoom. Otherwise, the old 200-400 f/4 was a bit soft at long range for the money, I'm not entirely happy with the sharpness of the 200-500 at the 500mm end (not that it's bad), and I found the Sigma 120-300 visibly softer than the 70-200 FL when I tried one; sharpness is worth reporting on.

Wildlife (especially birds or distant others) is certainly the biggest justification for a very long lens; there are sports shooters who would argue for the need for a 400 f/2.8 to frame someone on the far side of a football field, and I've used a 500mm to frame a tennis player from the far side of the court, but a 70-200 will certainly get you a lot of shots, which is why it's one of the traditional "big three" f/2.8 pro lenses (14-24, 24-70, 70-200) - especially since you'll have a bit more leeway for cropping with the extra pixels of a D7000 over a D70. If you find yourself wanting to split the difference, there is such a thing as a 120-300mm f/2.8 (Sigma make a very expensive one, and Nikon's is way more expensive than even that) - but then you'd have a larger gap back to the 17-50mm. I wouldn't be too scared of increasing the ISO on the D7000 - with moderation. It was one of the first sensors that was fairly "ISO-less", in that increasing ISO had roughly the same effect as shooting raw files at low ISO and then adjusting the exposure on a computer afterwards - so there absolutely is a benefit in keeping the ISO low if you like shadow detail. However, it should also give usable images at much higher ISO than the D70s - the D7000 nearly matches the D70s ISO200 rendition when the D7000 is at ISO 800 or 1600, depending on your metric. f/2.8 is better, but f/5.6 isn't the "bright sunlight only" choice it once was. I mention it just because a decent 70-300mm (the FX 70-300 AF-P VR) will set you back half as much as a good 70-200 f/2.8 like the Tamron G2, and a quarter as much as the Nikkor 70-200 FL. But you won't get the subject isolation or bright viewfinder at 200mm which the 70-200 would get you, obviously; the 70-200 is a staple of wedding and press shooters for a reason. (It's also bigger!) B&H's site offers me 14 kinds of 70-300mm for the Nikon mount. A few of those are open box ones, but even so... wow. Anyway, whether you go the 70-300 or 70-200 route, best of luck with it. If birding isn't a concern, these should suit you well. Fortunately there aren't many terrible lenses any more, although the truly exceptional ones still carry a premium. :-)

For reference for anyone else hitting this thread, Sigma do offer a mount conversion service - you can pay them to change whether the lens works with Nikon/Canon/Sony/Pentax. That can be useful if you yourself are swapping system, or if you can't return the lens for any reason (inheriting it, etc.) They do charge (more than this lens cost) for the service, and it only applies to some of their more expensive lenses, not this 10-20mm, I'm afraid. I suspect the general ability to switch mounts is a reason for them not to put "for Nikon" clearly on the lens. This seems to be a simple seller error. I hope they'll correct it for you without you being out of pocket. Sigma used to be known for optically iffy budget lenses - notably cheap superzooms. I had a 28-300mm Sigma in Canon mount, for example, and it was indeed poor at the long end. In more recent times they've been making some of the best lenses available, and (because the lenses are split between mounts) actually make more lenses than Nikon do; I have four, including some of my most-used lenses. Just in case Shun's purchasing choices put you off the brand. :-)

To an extent, yes (for birding, if you don't suddenly find you can afford a 500mm PF or an 800 f/5.6...) On the other hand, despite my assertion that you should buy what makes you happy, we might be getting ahead of ourselves for someone who's just acquired a D7000 and a couple of smallish zooms. The Sigma 60-600 is a (checks...) $1760 lens. Perhaps work up to it. :-) On the topic of slightly pricey Sigmas (no, I'm not going to bring up the 200-500 f/2.8...) I guess I should have mentioned the 18-35mm f/1.8, which by all accounts is very good, so long as you don't mind it ending a bit shy of the traditional range. Possibly an alternative to the 17-50 and idea of a 35mm prime, anyway. Choices choices.

Does seem to review well, if I understand it. Now if only I had that much spare money and the desire to photograph flat things that are exactly 36mm long... (Philately will get you nowhere, as the saying goes.) I've long had and pretty much never used a Manfrotto macro rail. I recently picked up a Neewer one, which has two axes of control(ish) and Arca clamps, although I think it only looks like it's screw-thread driven. Seemed okay for the aphids a few weeks back, other than issues with the breeze, but it's pretty bulky. I gather cheap driven macro rails aren't all that expensive. Lacking an obvious third axis control, I also picked up a little lifting bench, so the next time I'm inside with a suitable subject, I ought to be able to center it more accurately. This was mostly fun during the last black Friday deals, btw. It strikes me that since foreground points which are out of focus will intrude on the image of more distant ones, it ought to be possible to calculate this in an image stack and reverse it - effectively giving you an aperture shaped like a cone with cut-outs from the foreground. I've no idea whether that effect is either significant or worth it. It might be interesting if I ever find the need to photograph tea inside a tea bag. :-)

"Nifty fifties" (and their DX equivalent, 35mm)... I have to agree. I don't really like normal lenses - I usually prefer either wide or at least telephoto length, to provide a slightly more interesting perspective, but YMMV. Historically they're easy and cheap to make, and up until the latest Z-mount versions, I've considered every Nikon version to be not worth the money (okay, I've not used a noct-Nikkor). I have a 50mm f/1.8 series E (only because it's tiny), the f/1.8 AF-D (bought very early, and it is small), and the f/1.8 AF-S (because it's better than the AF-D at moderate apertures, and fairly small). The f/1.4 versions are twice the money for also not very good (for me) performance - particularly LoCA. The bokeh on the AF-D is ugly, too. They're all okay stopped down to f/5.6... but so are a lot of zooms. I carried the AF-D in my "travel pack" essentially in case I got stuck somewhere in the dark, where I might prefer a soft image over a noisy one or ugly bokeh over a more visible background; I rarely bother now. I overstate things a bit, but still, they're not my choice. I did get the Sigma Art 50mm (and 35mm), which were... somewhat better. Even then, I shot at f/2 or below if I could. I now have the 40mm Sigma, which is better still and usable at f/1.4... but it's huge (I keep confusing it with the 85mm) and expensive. Cartier-Bresson did shoot with a 50mm lens a lot, but the joke is that Leica lenses are so expensive he couldn't afford anything else. I suspect there are even more unused 50mm lenses out there than the used market would suggest, because they're worth so little that people don't bother to get rid of them - at least, that's an argument I've used. 50mm primes have their use, but I think that use is less now that zooms have improved, VR deals with a lot of the light gathering, and your image is no longer swamped in grain the moment you go past ISO 400. These days a 50mm is a passable portrait lens (in the "lose the background" sense) on DX, but a bit shorter than ideal. The 35mm DX is probably less bad, although it has plenty of LoCA, but it also loses the background less than a 50mm. If you're after a 50mm for DX, I vaguely point out to people that the 50mm f/1.4 Sigma HSM pre-Art isn't bad for the money - the corners are mush on full frame, but within the DX sensor it holds up. It's no Art, but personally I'd take it over the Nikkor equivalent if I wanted a DX option. The 70-200 f/4 is an oddball. It's certainly not as sharp as the latest FL, but it's much cheaper (and lighter). The f/4 lens doesn't seem to be available any more in a lot of places - I'm not aware of it being discontinued, so this surprised me. Perhaps the biggest argument against it is that you can get the Tamron 70-200 f/2.8 G2 for the same money, and that's a very good lens.

Really? The Wikipedia page talks mostly about longitudinal (axial) aberrations in the context of apochromatic lenses, and uses lateral as a synonym for transverse aberrations. By this definition, longitudinal chromatic aberration (what I call "LoCA") affects whether the image of different wavelengths from the same point in the subject fall at different distances from the lens, and lateral/transverse aberration ("LCA") affects the magnification of the image at different wavelengths even if everything is in focus. LCA is relatively fixable in software (to an extent), since you're just scaling the colour channels differently; the issue with LoCA is that you don't have the 3D light field information once the image is captured, so fixing it has to be heuristic. I don't actually know whether Canon do anything about this with their dual-pixel capture ability. LoCA is usually highly dependent on aperture, whereas LCA is usually less so. My understanding is that a simple lens would focus all frequencies at a different focal length (if 560nm green were in focus on the focal plane, 450nm blue might be focussed in front of it, and 700nm red might focus behind it); dispersion in optical media causes the frequencies to bend by different amounts, and if you only have one kind of glass there's not much you can do to bend the light and still get everything back in line. If you only want to look at a single frequency, though, this can still be fine. An achromatic doublet uses two kinds of optical medium with different dispersion properties, which means you can put a "bend" in the relationship between focal plane and wavelength: red and blue may hit the same plane, but green would be somewhere else. A lot of photographic lenses meet this definition, and it's common to have a green fringe behind the subject and a purple fringe in front because of it. Simplistically, it's like having a quadratic equation relating frequency and focal distance, rather than a linear equation. The terminology typically seems to be that an "apochromat" can get three wavelengths aligned (meaning a cubic equation, by the same analogy), and typically this also means that all visible frequencies are pretty close to the focal plane. I believe marketing gets involved, and some lenses that just have very good correction (for example because the total amount of dispersion is small) get an "APO" label even if they don't strictly line up three wavelengths. I suspect this means you need three different optical materials with different dispersions involved, although I'm guessing at that point and don't claim enough knowledge of optics. If you have four or more wavelengths corrected to the focal plane, the term seems to be "super-achromat", although again I suspect marketing would get involved. It might be nice of "order-n corrected" were written somewhere, but that's simplifying all the other aberrations that need to be corrected. Again, that's not how I've understood it. If you have the same point focus at different distances from the lens in red and green, green may form a sharp point, but red would form a circle of confusion. In other words, if you're trying to focus on a plane and you have an achromatic (but not apochromatic) lens, you can at best get two frequencies in focus, and everything else is a little blurry. If you want to copy a monochrome image illuminated by a laser, you don't need chromatic aberration correction; if you want to use white light, you do. A side effect of different frequencies hitting different focal planes is coloured fringes: if a point of light expands to a cone at the lens (well, the light expands in a sphere, but the bit hitting the front of the lens is a cone) and then that cone is brought back to a different point at each frequency, the point is larger when it's out of focus, and stays larger as you get more out of focus (probably more so - the cones of light have different angles), which is why you get "coloured bokeh"; this is usually way more visible than the amount by which light misses focus. Fortunately an easy way to limit the amount of visible LoCA is to limit the maximum angle of the light cones - in other words, pick a small aperture. Copy lenses do tend to be designed to limit distortion and LCA, but you need everything corrected if you want to take perfect colour photos even of a flat field. Of course, you can also put a colour filter on the front of the lens and deal with one(ish) wavelength at a time. :-) I don't know whether focus stacking software does this, but in theory nothing stops you handling different light frequencies separately. Just pull the images into separate RGB channels and stack them independently. A sensor filter covers a wide range of wavelengths rather than a single one (which is why you can't fix LCA perfectly in post-processing), but it might have a positive effect. I've so far concluded that focus stacking is difficult (also I need a MacBook with more RAM), so I'll let an expert report back...

I'm going to say a brief and possibly unpopular word in defence of Gear Acquisition Syndrome. The photographer is the most important part of getting a good photograph, but everything contributes - how much depends on the shot. A novice at a wedding with a high-end camera will very likely take worse photos than an expert with a cheap compact (I say "likely" in part because luck is also a factor) - but the pro would likely do better still given better equipment. Take an image of a static subject with a decent amount of light and a balanced amount of dynamic range, requiring a moderate amount of depth of field and putting the result on screen, and almost any camera will cope well. Indeed, almost any recent camera will handle a large range of subjects very well indeed - there aren't really bad cameras and few bad lenses any more. There are a small number of shots for which the kit can make a significant difference, and if you're lucky enough to be able to afford it, there's something to be said for taking the equipment out of the equation as much as you feel willing to do. Sometimes the result is inspirational and can help your skills, sometimes retail therapy isn't the worst crime. 99% of the time I've been by far the most limiting factor in my photos for some years; I could have had a lot more money if I made that 95% of the time instead, but I made my choice. Even the best kit still has limits, and it's annoying to get the photographer's part (fairly) right for once only to have the kit get in the way. I'm lucky enough to have some quite expensive kit partly because I don't want to spend my time thinking "this was good... but should I have spent a little more?" Many years back Thom Hogan did an article on buying tripods in which he promised to save you $700 on buying a tripod by telling you just to buy a $1000 tripod, rather than buying lots of cheaper tripods before eventually deciding that you needed the $1000 one anyway. There's the old argument that rich people stay rich because they only ever buy the best stuff once (also it lasts). Currently my personal biggest concern with this is the 200-500mm - it's very good, but probably not quite as good as either the 60-600mm Sigma or the 500mm PF prime, both of which are somewhat more expensive. When/if I eventually get one of those, I'll be out of pocket for the 200-500 (or at least the difference between what it cost me and however much I can get for it). Meanwhile, of course, I have some shots with the 200-500 that I wouldn't have taken at all if I was waiting to save up, so there's also an argument for "never look back". In other words, if it makes you happy to buy camera gear, don't let anyone tell you not to. It almost definitely won't be the best way to improve your photography, but it probably won't make it worse. What's more relevant is deciding the best place to put your money - it's easy to throw money at an expensive lens (like a 70-200, which is perfectly decent and an aspirational lens to own, but won't help you much with birds or family photos) and find afterwards that it didn't solve as many of your problems as if you'd put the same money elsewhere. First find something you want to shoot that you can't with your current kit (or which it handles badly), then go shopping. As others have pointed out, at least a 16MP sensor will be sometimes limiting the image quality more than the lens aberrations. This means you may not see the difference between an old 80-200 f/2.8 and the latest 70-200mm FL anything like as clearly as someone with more pixels to play with. That's a good thing for your sanity, but plan ahead. The big one is whether you ever expect to go to a full-frame sensor - buying only DX lenses will save you money, but limit you if you do that. By that time, you may be looking at mirrorless and a new mount anyway, of course. Video is typically even more forgiving - I still have an old 28-80mm zoom that I've used for video on my D810, because it's not bad, and HD video is 2MP - it won't show most of the quality issues. Video is one of the better arguments for a superzoom - it's much harder to do a good job of zooming an image in post-processing with any semblance of quality. Sometimes image quality isn't what matters anyway; I'm considering a 24-85 VR so I have a better lightweight lens to carry around, but I don't expect it to outperform the Tamron 24-70 I already own. The best camera is the one that's with you, and all that. Specifically picking on the 24-120 f/4, I saw it appeared on Thom Hogan's "lenses I've fallen out of love with" list. I mention that because I came to the same conclusion. Even on FX, it's surprisingly big and heavy to carry around, and optically... "okay". It's still much better for image quality than the publicly panned 24-120 f/3.5-5.6 which came before it, but it's also appreciably chubbier. I found I'd usually carry my Tamron 24-70 instead, so I got rid of my 24-120. The other thing about it is that, as a stand-alone lens, the 24-120 f/4 is remarkably expensive - more so than, say, getting a Sony RX100 VI to carry around as a travel camera, and the Sony fits in a pocket (with a phone...) It's often bundled with cameras, and when people break up the kit you may find one for a more reasonable amount of money, but to my mind it's not much lens for the money. On a D7000 I'd find the 24mm end limiting and it very big for the camera - but that's my personal preference, and if it personally works for anyone else, I'm not going to claim I know best. Just... caveat emptor. Like I said, I'm considering the 24-85 as an FX lens where I was hoping the 24-120 would work for me, but that's for my set of requirements. :-)

Also the Tamron was historically considered to be quite good (at least compared with the AF-S G), and works with everything. Anything resembling a 70-300 from before the time of the 70-300G VR was likely awful, though - there was a jump in image quality from lenses in that class around the time Canon launched their version. Choices choices. :-) I use my ultra-wide (14-24, in my case) for landscapes, but of course perspective distortion looks awful if you put people near the edges of the frame, so it's not a "fit everyone into the living room" lens, even if I've had to use it like one occasionally. (See my photos this Nikon Wednesday - my neighbours aren't that fat. I am, but I'm not in the shot...) For what it's worth, some fish-eye lenses are a lot smaller and cheaper than rectilinear ultrawides, and if you don't mind losing some pixels you can "de-fish" the result in software.

While the planned national VE-day anniversary celebrations (75th, for anyone not following) obviously had their plans go to pot, it was nice to see the locals out. I'm always a bit wary about how, in post-Brexit Britain, the message gets spun - unlike many in my locality I was pro-remain, and I think some of the nationalism can be detrimental (pride in your country is good, but preferably not regardless of what it's doing), which is sad because it makes me uncomfortable whenever I see a union flag. I'm very glad to celebrate the anniversary in a "let's not allow this to happen again" sense, though. </politics>

My local grebes are nesting in plain view in the middle of the local mill pond, but alas not very close to the shore. They also really like turning their posterior in my direction. Next week, perhaps. I spent an hour in the garden on Friday, long after an unadvertised Red Arrows flypast, waiting for some Spitfires for this thread - I heard them (I think), but apparently I should have shot through my dirty study window because I couldn't see them over the neighbours' houses. So instead, a social distancing VE day street party for you (in which everyone tries to make "small shout" with their neighbours who are a house width apart). My wife and I got heat stroke and sunburn after a bit and went in, but the neighbours were still singing "We'll meet again" (and YMCA...) after 10pm. Apologies for the lack of aesthetics - I'm really not a street shooter, even when it's my own street, but it's what I've got to share. (D850, 14-24, DxO trying to manage the dynamic range.)

Oops. Sorry, you're right - the FX 70-300 has slightly wider compatibility than the DX version. (It's also more expensive, of course.) According to Thom's tracking of it, on the D7000 it'll lose focus position when the meter turns back on, which is a little inconvenient but not the end of the world - whereas the DX version won't work at all. Which is a shame, because the DX version is supposed to be pretty good for the money. The older 70-300mm VR AF-S G works fine, of course, but is a little less sharp. Re. superzooms, I used my 28-200 (full-frame, not the 18-200) on my D700 a lot. It was pretty small and could act as a body cap until I knew what else I needed. On a D800, where I had more pixels to see what was going on, the newly-visible chromatic aberrations rapidly bothered me, and I traded it; it is very difficult to build a zoom lens that is well-corrected throughout the range, at least without spending TV lens money. (Similarly I suspect a lot, but not all, reviews of the 18-200 were on lower MP bodies, where it was fine.) I've since revisited some of the few raw images I shot with that combination with DxO, and it recovers enough detail that I vaguely regret getting rid of it. However, the 28-200 was a lot smaller than the 18-200 or the 24-120 (which I also had and disposed of). I don't mind carrying a big lens, but only if I know I want it, and a superzoom is a "just in case" lens. I used to carry the 28-200, a 50mm f/1.8 and the 135mm f/2.8 AI (for portraits) in a smallish bag, when wandering around. Getting rid of the 18-200 isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'd ensure that you have a replacement - otherwise you're guaranteed to see a rare bird that you could capture at 200mm when you've swapped it for a 35mm prime or even a 200-500 that you've left at home. While manual focus of telephoto lenses is annoying (especially if the subject moves), if you do ditch the 18-200 for something shorter, you might like to seek out a cheap pocketable 200mm f/4 AI or similar, just in case...

There has been a lot of negative writing about the technical image quality of the 18-200, some of it parroted by me in a potentially misguided attempt to be helpful. It certainly may not hold up as well as the state of the art, particularly compared against lenses with smaller zoom ranges (or primes), especially as the image sensor count increases - but modern image processing software is pretty good at getting rid of lens aberrations, and as a "lens to have with you" it's pretty flexible. Mary has been very defensive of hers, and while I'm sure she has a "good copy", that does mean it can't be as bad as I've heard some say. As others said, at the least, I'd try it until you're sure about focal lengths. If "family photos" includes chasing small running children, a bit of zoom range is a good thing - but the available light might be an issue. For subject isolation, there's something to be said for a longer lens rather than a faster, shorter one - a fast, short prime limits the depth of field at the same background blur and, since a lot of aberrations depend on aperture, it may look worse. It depends how close your subject is to the background, of course. I wouldn't rule out a slow zoom at 300mm (or 200mm) instead of a 50mm prime, at least some of the time. I tried street photography a little while back, to stretch myself (and because I ran out of new ducks to photograph near my office). A big lens gets greeted with suspicion. People in the UK away from tourist areas seem to be pretty suspicious about the motives of photographers (everyone's a paedophile until proven otherwise). As a middle-aged white male, particularly from a single-sex private school background, I have an extreme sense of personal space and impinging on that of others (the COVID-19 lockdown hasn't done much to me - I never went within two metres of people I don't know anyway); that makes me worry about how others may feel if I photograph them, which make me look furtive, which makes people assume I'm up to no good... It probably doesn't help that I don't really do social media (too much training about computer security and privacy concerns), and so I come from the premise of "what do you mean you want to put a selfie on the internet?" Oddly I found an old Coolpix-A in a leather case (which was the smallest one I could find) seemed to get a better reaction from the average member of the public because people assumed I was arty, whereas my much more expensive dSLR roused suspicion. In the end I mostly gave up and photographed buildings and flowers, but I'm glad others enjoy street photography. :-) Birding gets expensive (even as an amateur like me, if you want to put more than a few pixels on the bird), and unless you're very good and patient with a hide, basically a very long lens is good. And very long lenses are expensive. The 70-300VR would probably be a minimum, I'd have though; unfortunately it's not as good as the newer AF-P versions (from the reviews I've read), but the AF-Ps won't focus on the D7000. I'd say keep saving until you can get a big zoom (200-500, 60-600, etc.) but that may be a bit extreme. If you happen to spot a 300mm f/4 (even the pre-VR) going for a bargain, it's worth a look. TL;DR: Don't rush the birding lens, don't rush to a fast prime unless you're sure you want it (not because of the old "everyone should have a nifty fifty" advice - that applied more when every zoom was iffy, film sucked about ISO 400, and bear in mind that a 35mm f/1.8 doesn't isolate the background like a 50mm f/1.8), and I'd be sure before ditching the 18-200 - which isn't to say you shouldn't. Generally, I only buy a new lens when there's something specific I want to do that the old one(s) can't - then the question is "which version of the ... is better?" and that's possibly less subjective.

I had a little rummage in Thom's D850 manual (since Nikon don't seem to have made this obvious). It appears that Nikon uses h.264, and uses B frames to improve compression quality (which not all implementations do). Some older Nikon bodies recorded video as motion JPEG (all the frames recorded separately), which is slightly nicer for editing but does mean that the compression is significantly lower. It does look like the MP4/MOV format thing is only a wrapper and doesn't affect the encoded size, although I've not confirmed that. Normal vs high quality and resolution significantly affect bit rate. That's the only degree of control over bit rate, though - bear in mind that if you import the file to a computer, a program such as those mentioned by Conrad or (for those of us with Adobe CC anyway for Photoshop) Premiere Pro lets you tweak things more finely to balance size against quality; as with a JPEG, video lets you choose how much image quality to throw away in order to make the file small. Email is a very inefficient way to distribute large files. The email standard has to work with plain text and pass through all kinds of potentially ancient computers; binary attachments typically (unless things have changed since my day) get encoded with base64 encoding, which makes them bigger by 4/3 in order to guarantee that only "safe" characters are used. You're also putting a multi-megabyte file in everyone's inbox, and people often have relatively strict email folder limits (my former employers gave us 1GB each for all our email unless we archived; online free email has historically been much more restrictive than even that, because someone somewhere had to buy a hard disk to put all the email on). Beyond that, it's common for email systems to limit the file size quite strictly - 25MB is pretty generous, and you may find that some people can't receive an email larger than 10MB, for example; by default, I believe my home email server is set up not to let me send more than 5MB per email. I've had issues where the only official way to get things in and out of work was via email (the email server was used to track the transmission of any sensitive files), and the moment I put a video in a PowerPoint slide, doing anything like this with it was incredibly tedious. On the other hand, I've seen people try to upload video-heavy slide decks at a conference which were multiple GB in size; I've usually done my best to balance compression in the belief that someone will eventually want to download them. Also bear in mind that if you're emailing multiple recipients, something somewhere is replicating that data to send it; if that's happening inside your house, you'll be uploading all that data multiple times. Not everyone has a fast connection and an unlimited usage cap... Finally, never underestimate someone else's ability to reply-all and keep the attachments, so they get sent repeatedly, especially if there might be a bounce from a typo. TL;DR: friends don't send friends video in email attachments. Social media or a video streaming platform like YouTube which offers adaptive bit rates, or at least Google Drive/DropBox, are much more appropriate. :-) Having said all that, I very rarely touch video. So good luck!