Re: Thank You Again Everyone

Dave,

There is a lot of good advice here regarding your camera and how to get the best out of it. One thing I should mention is that the maximum sharpness of any lens (fixed focal length or zoom) occurs at two stops below the MAXIMUM aperture. So, in the case of an f4 lens, it is optimally sharp at f8 (infinity focus). Beyond that at smaller apertures, diffraction becomes more apparent... which is the reason that Ansel Adams and his f/64 group gave up on the maximum aperture...

Increasing the ISO of your camera is tempting, and may well help, however be aware that doing that will have the same effect as it did in film days... more noise (in film, it was grain size) and less acuity.

In general, fixed focal length lenses are almost always sharper than zoom lenses... for the same series. I recently compared a fixed focus manual 85mm Nikor lens (from maybe 25 years ago) to my Nikor 24-85 kit lens. Hmmm... the 24-85 was sharper, more contrasty (contrast is a component in sharpness) and had less visible aberations than the older fixed focus lens* (the 85 had a well-deserved reputation as a very sharp lens... in it's day).

One more thing... don't use conventional lenses for macro photography. There's a reason that the lens manufacturers offer macro lenses... they are optimized for extremely flat fields of focus, which is critical to macro and close-up photography. They work well as regular lenses, but to achieve the necessary flat field, are usually slower than most equivalent normal lenses.

*I was using my Nikon D810 for this comparison... cameras with lower pixel count sensors will not be as obvious. Try it with your camera to see how much difference there is with your equipment.

Bill Daniels
Santa Rosa, California