Suggestion requested for Camera Body + Lens for travel/landscape photography

[Sash]

Strangely, some find handling a bigger and/or heavier camera easier and better...  So the recipe of small/light is beautiful is not universally applicable. 

What *is* important, however, is pre-planning and pre-visualising any trip to find the minimum gear set required. People tending to bring everything is what I all too often observe on my workshops.

Yes , it is very personal indeed. I have slim wrists and find large FF bodies uncomfortable to carry around and shoot with for a long period of time. Then again, there is a huge difference in shooting landscapes where you have all time in the world compared to street, where you literally often have a split second. I think ultimately one can get used to any camera. But I would choose a smaller/lighter one on any day, never mind travelling. Back to my good old little Ricoh GR. I only had a second to shoot this one. The first image is obviously an ultra heavy crop of the large one below :

[simsurace]

Simone, thanks for you imput.  I needed corner-to-corner sharpness focused at distance without stopping down too much when I shot nightscapes with the moon in the sky.  When the shutter speed is to slow, the moon is blurred. (yes, the moon travels unexpectedly fast!)  I didn't want to raise ISO too much either because of the noise.

You could do two exposures to achieve that. In order to get details in the moon (not sure you want that, but you can easily blow them if not), you need fairly fast shutter speeds (after all, the sunlit surface of the moon is almost as bright as a sunlit rock on earth). You can combine that with a longer exposure for the cityscape. I've never tried to do such a shot with a 50, only with longer lenses (like 180 or so, which needs more stopping down to get both moon and landscape in focus, or two exposures as above, but with an additional refocus inbetween). I'm curious how the 50/1.8G would pull it off.

I understand your frustration with QC and tolerances which are too big, I too hope these aspects will improve over time.

[Akira]

This is one of the nightscapes I took with 50/1.8G and D610.  ISO100, f5.6, 6sec.  The top and bottom was trimmed.  In this particular image, the entire image is pretty sharp.  The moon is rendered oval due to its movement.

[Anirban Halder]

I have a family holiday album that is mostly 24-120 f4…

Thanks for sharing Rob. Great shots. Lively colours.

A full frame camera and traveling light never go together in my view. Whatever the lense, by taking a FF body with you, you are effectively putting a brick into your bag.

Thanks for your inputs Sash. Ricoh GR looks like a great camera and then there are mirrors options. Somewhere I need to make up my mind. And, I’ve done that - I want to go for a FX. Like Bjørn mentioned, weight and size are personal choices too. For me anything heavier than D200 and 18-200mm combo is “heavy”. So based on that D750 should suit me well I hope unless I put a 70-200mm f2.8 in it.

I very much agree with you about the difference between street and landscape.
Mostly I travel with family (with a little kid). So, I usually don’t get lot of dedicated time to compose or change gear. Hence, personally having a street zoom helps me a lot for candid shots. For e.g. below ones - if I had to change gear, I would have missed few of them. Sometime they are not super-sharp images, but cool memories!

[RobOK]

I'm not sure what memory you are capturing in the last one!!!  LOL - kidding!

[Anirban Halder]

Oh, that's the true memory of vacation, Rob! LOL!

[Bjørn Rørslett]

Santorini?

[Anirban Halder]

Yes Bjørn, Santorini. All four of them.

[simsurace]

This is one of the nightscapes I took with 50/1.8G and D610.  ISO100, f5.6, 6sec.  The top and bottom was trimmed.  In this particular image, the entire image is pretty sharp.  The moon is rendered oval due to its movement.

This does not look too bad. Now it is already hard for me to see the ovalness of the moon, at least at this size. I suspect that going to ISO 400 and 1.5sec would have made it almost imperceptible. Noise should not be a problem at ISO400, and you can maintain f5.6 to achieve excellent sharpness.

[Akira]

This does not look too bad. Now it is already hard for me to see the ovalness of the moon, at least at this size. I suspect that going to ISO 400 and 1.5sec would have made it almost imperceptible. Noise should not be a problem at ISO400, and you can maintain f5.6 to achieve excellent sharpness.

Strange to say, I think you are right.  I remembered this image as an example of the smeared image in the 1/5 of the frame, but the distant buildings seems to be fairly sharp across the entire width.  The image is not trimmed sideways.  I would have to review the images taken with the same combo.

[simsurace]

It is still possible that you had a misaligned copy, or that the bajonet of the camera was misaligned. It is not the easiest shot to pull off also because of coma. I once tried a similar one with the 35/2 ZF lens at f/2. In the corners, the performance on point light sources is not satisfactory. I ended up taking two shots and stitching them, avoiding the corners altogether. Also your shot could be accomplished as a panorama of vertical shots with a long focal length, maybe 180mm or so. You would have hundreds of megapixels to downsample from, yielding a very good image quality.

[Akira]

It is still possible that you had a misaligned copy, or that the bajonet of the camera was misaligned. It is not the easiest shot to pull off also because of coma. I once tried a similar one with the 35/2 ZF lens at f/2. In the corners, the performance on point light sources is not satisfactory. I ended up taking two shots and stitching them, avoiding the corners altogether. Also your shot could be accomplished as a panorama of vertical shots with a long focal length, maybe 180mm or so. You would have hundreds of megapixels to downsample from, yielding a very good image quality.

A DX body and FX lens combo eliminates the coma problem efficiently.  That's partially why I ended up with my current combo.  Also, you are spot on by mentioning pano, because that's exactly what I enjoy doing that, thanks to the improvement of Photomerge in Adobe CC.

[Peter Connan]

I think the biggest advantage of the D750 over the D600/610 is the AF, which is one of your stated objectives for upgrading, although I don't think that your stated usage should be very demanding of fast AF...

I recently acquired the D750 (upgrading from D7000) and 24-120 f4. I think this lens is very good, but it is quite bulky and heavy. It is bigger and heavier than three or four of the short primes from the film era. But for my usage for this lens, the ability to zoom more rapidly than I can walk is quite valuable.

[Anirban Halder]

Thanks for the feedback. I've been looking for an used D610 at a reasonable price. Been unsuccessful so far.

[Anirban Halder]

Call me names.. but I finally purchased a Fuji X-T10. I will certainly buy a D750 (or similar body) in future but for various reasons (budget and Fuji glass quality are key among them) I went ahead with Fuji for the time-being.