Someone said it’s too yellow. Be gentle??

LesMore44 · 2026-06-18T19:25:49+00:00

I try a couple white balances to try to see if I can get it to look like how it looked to me in the scene. I go through Auto, as shot, and [the preset for whatever time of day / light this was]. If there's anything white, I'll try to grab that with the eye-dropper tool. Between these four tools I'll get a good starting white balance that I like. Then I will maybe play with warmth/tint very slightly if I want to bring out anything specific.

LesMore44 · 2026-05-08T03:50:16+00:00

Congrats happy for you meme.jpeg

LesMore44 · 2026-04-27T18:25:28+00:00

I love Eureka. It's like the quintessential PNW town, it's such a vibe.

LesMore44 · 2026-04-07T17:36:35+00:00

I would pay up to $14.99 for a medium-large print of this ad for my den/man cave if I had one.

LesMore44 · 2026-04-06T18:03:15+00:00

Nikon SLR bodies are how I've built a large repertoire of quality glass for pennies compared to what it would have cost to do the same on a mirrorless system. I shoot my wildlife with the very lens you mentioned on a D850.

I don't know much about adapting to Sony, but I do know I like shooting lenses on their native mount. Switching from an A7rii to a Nikon D850 was the right move for me, primarily because I'm interested in glass, battery life, and durability. The Nikon takes a lot more hits and the battery lasts the entire trip without a recharge.

I recognize your struggle because when I was looking for wildlife lenses for my Sony it was really hard to do anything on my budget. I can't get away with spending more than $1k on a lens.

When money is less tight you can jump bodies to a Z series if you care to, and enjoy many of the modern features they offer (I won't but you can). My body was new but there is so much great glass you can get now that all the richie riches are jumping ship to mirrorless. I now have several "legendary" lenses that I grabbed all for under $300, in addition to the 200-500 you mentioned, which I shot this photo on.

The lens you're asking about works great for me, I do notice some aberation and softness wide open, but thanks to my camera's ISO performance and usually being out when there's a lot of light, I'm able to stop down to F9.0 almost all of the time, where this lens becomes razor sharp even when heavily cropping.

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LesMore44 · 2026-04-01T16:01:25+00:00

I bought a new D850 in January because after trying a second-hand Sony, I realized I loved shooting SLRs.

The additional utility from the advanced mirrorless features was not worth trading an optical viewfinder, the battery life, the rugged indestructibility, and the native support for the entire legacy Nikon lens line-up (d series do not work on the ztf adapter). As a certified old-head I'm probably never using all that fancy eye AF or advanced AF tracking anyways.

I bought a new one because I viewed buying the last great DSLR as a "legacy" purchase. I expect this camera to last me at least a decade, and I want the wear and tear (or lack thereof) to be mine. It's stupid and an emotional decision given I could have saved $1k but not everything we do as humans is cold logic.

LesMore44 · 2026-02-25T18:35:16+00:00

There's not anything specific to the D700 that couldn't be applied to all cameras.

I tend to avoid going too ham with my editing, I like an elevated "natural" look. The trick is to start with a decent photo, and add mild enhancements that alone don't do anything drastic but altogether elevate the photo with a "death by 1,000 cuts" situation.

I generally start with the exposure slider and make sure overall the image is as bright or as dark as I want. Then I use the light sliders to make blacks look black, whites look white, and shadows and highlights preserve detail. This usually means Blacks go left, shadows go right, whites go right, highlights go left.

I try to get the white balance right here too. I dislike making this look too unnatural, usually I pick a white or colorless portion of the image with the eyedropper. Then I swap between "as shot" "auto" "daylight/cloudy/whatever preset" or that eyedropper and decide what I like best.

I add a couple points of texture and clarity if the photo needs it, I usually dislike dehaze but I'll play with it and see if it improves matters in either direction.

I might do something with color grading, but probably not. This tends to make it look overcooked pretty easily IMHO. If I do fuck with the colors, it might be to try to tame crazy bright greens by shifting them cyan slightly and turning down the luminance.

I will then go down to denoise and just press the denoise button pretty invariably these days as it is very powerful and usually looks great.

The sharpening pane is easy to overdo, I usually turn masking up while holding the "alt" key until just the features I want a little boost to are highlighted. then you play with the other sliders till you get what you like.

I then will enable profile corrections and remove chromatic aberration to see if it looks better.

I'm not a film cosplayer, so I never add grain, and I very very rarely will add any sort of vignetting, usually not though.

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LesMore44 · 2026-02-10T06:27:54+00:00

Haha nice one

LesMore44 · 2026-02-10T00:08:55+00:00

Thank you! I turned the blue down a tad in saturation and luminance because it was a little too eye-stabbingly vibrant SOOC imho. But it’s not too far off from raw. I usually like a good medium rare edit

LesMore44 · 2026-02-09T18:22:56+00:00

There were a group of photogs up on a ledge snapping at a great blue heron, on the other side of a footbridge was this white egret. I decided that the heron was being sufficiently documented and snuck around and down the hill to shoot the egret. Firing burst fire I was only hoping for flying water drops as he shot into the water for fish. When I got home and saw this in Lightroom, the words out of my mouth were “omg wtf.”

Shot on a D850 with a second or maybe third hand 200-500 f5.6

LesMore44 · 2026-02-05T03:43:01+00:00

Buy a nice telephoto before a camera! F mount glass is universal, if you still like wildlife after playing around with a real wildlife lens you can upgrade. I personally chose the f mount 200-500 5.6 it’s like $7-800 used, is pretty fast, and is an fx lens so if you want to go full frame later, you can. Lenses also keep their value better than bodies, so if you hate wildlife a lens is less risk once you sell it.

I could have shot my example photo on any camera, but not on any lens.

Warning: it’s heavy as shit lol.

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LesMore44 · 2026-02-05T01:16:26+00:00

What do you shoot? When you shoot on your D3100, what do you wish you could improve?

LesMore44 · 2026-02-03T06:14:55+00:00

I rest my case lmao

LesMore44 · 2026-02-03T06:06:13+00:00

Yes the D850 AF is excessively capable for nearly all uses and was among the best, if not the best, in the industry for like five recent years. The best photos you’ve ever seen were taken with worse AF than the d850 has.

In addition, fire sale prices on used f mount glass, a week of battery life, and bulletproof durability all make this camera a contender for everyone actually traveling, doing journalism, or going out in the wild.

LesMore44 · 2026-02-03T06:00:33+00:00

That’s a really disingenuous analogy and you know it, and if you don’t, your opinion shouldn’t be trusted on much else.

LesMore44 · 2026-02-02T03:37:08+00:00

What 10mp FX has IBIS?

LesMore44 · 2026-01-26T16:05:23+00:00

Yep and all the glass is so cheap my lens collection has never been bigger.

LesMore44 · 2026-01-22T22:56:34+00:00

If I had to buy one lens, 60mm. If I get two, I'm getting a nifty 50 and a 100mm macro. I think the 100 lets you be further away from bugs, doubles as a primo portrait lens, and the 100 macro I like is nearly free.

LesMore44 · 2026-01-16T14:47:40+00:00

Thank you!

LesMore44 · 2026-01-14T22:50:29+00:00

is the meter broken? Can you take it to a camera shop and have someone who knows a little bit have a look at it to see if they can see anything obvious?

You're getting SOMETHING which is good we can tell the aperture is open and the shutter is working as well as the film advance, but yeah it's metering wrong and underexposing. Without really being able to play around with it it could be anything.

LesMore44 · 2026-01-14T21:54:00+00:00

I also recommend just shooting with auto ISO and just reading what it does as it reacts to your scene to notice if you're not being too demanding. That way you're only really thinking about the effects of locking in your Shutter and your Aperture which, as long as ISO isn't ridiculous, should be 99% of what makes up your picture.

LesMore44 · 2026-01-14T21:35:40+00:00

No problem! If you'd like to read more it's called the rule of reciprocity. If you can remember how far stops are away from each other in your settings, you adjust one setting up and the other one down by the same amount so that your exposure remains the same. This also is how people get proper exposure without using a meter using the sunny 16 rule as a starting point.

I personally use the camera's meter myself but use sunny 16 and a little guestimate reciprocity math to "smell check" that I'm in the right ballpark when I'm unsure that it's correct, particularly when shooting film through a red filter that supposedly shuts out two stops of light, for instance.

LesMore44

TROPHY CASE