Nikon 24-85VR - harvest time soon

[Franglais]

So I finished decorating my kitchen, back to photography to realise:

1. The images I do with my D800 are better than those with my D300 and I want to use it more often
2. My 28-70 f2.8 is too big and heavy for what I want to do
3. My 2003 24-85 AF-S has a serious problem with focussing and sharpness

So bite the bullet - rushed out last night and and bought the latest 24-85VR. Anxious morning testing it - the center is very sharp, the corners are awful but I can live with it. Shot out this afternoon to do a few real-life tests:

1 and 2. St Germain des Prés (Paris)
3. Eglise Saint Sulpice (Paris) at 5000 ISO
4 and 5. Vauboyen (village 11 miles from the center of Paris). Harvest time soon (number 4 is actually done with the 70-300VR)

[Greg McCary]

Nice work Charles. I have been baby sitting a D800 and 17-35mm. The whole camera is over kill for what I do. But I am sure in 5 or 10 years the huge files will seem small.
If I do keep it I plan just to get a few primes. I am still happy with the a850 but I would think the D800 would be the last camera a landscaper would ever need.
How would you manage 1000's of pictures if you were an ever day fashion shooter? I filled a hard drive already this year with my little old Sony.

[Franglais]

...
How would you manage 1000's of pictures if you were an ever day fashion shooter? I filled a hard drive already this year with my little old Sony.

All of my image files are on external drives:

- an SSD for files I'm working on
- a NAS for the finished JPG's
- offline USB drives for the RAW files.

Disks have been growing even faster than image sizes. Currently I buy 2TB drives (less than $100 for a bare drive). That's enough for 46000 D800 RAW files.

The hard drive of my main portable just contains databases (ACDSee for the JPG's, Lightroom for the RAW files) to let me keep track of things. There is also a thumbnail of each image with all the metadata and all my collections of images.

[Greg McCary]

All of my image files are on external drives:

- an SSD for files I'm working on
- a NAS for the finished JPG's
- offline USB drives for the RAW files.

Disks have been growing even faster than image sizes. Currently I buy 2TB drives (less than $100 for a bare drive). That's enough for 46000 D800 RAW files.

The hard drive of my main portable just contains databases (ACDSee for the JPG's, Lightroom for the RAW files) to let me keep track of things. There is also a thumbnail of each image with all the metadata and all my collections of images.

Thanks Charles I have yet to buy any drives in the TB range but I guess I will need to. My first round with the D800 was stitching a panoramic and even though I have plenty of HD space at the moment. But running both Lightroom and CS6 at the same time slowed my computer down some.

[armando_m]

LOL! I'm waiting for that lens (24-85VR ) to arrive ...

Looking forward to the small size zoom with VR

About image management I also have a 1tb and two 500gb external usb drives , plus I'm getting more picky about what files I should really keep