Let me preface this post by saying I still want a Nikon Df. Unfortunately, these unique retro Nikons are still over a grand on the used market. Since I use Canons for work and just shoot my Nikons for fun, that's more than I can justify shelling out on a camera body.
Blog friend Jim had stumbled into a screaming deal on one and, having been mostly out of the SLR game since the film days, he wrote to see if I had any suggestions for a budget-friendly lens kit. After a bit of research on the intertubes to check a detail about the Df's focusing motor, it looked like Jim was in luck, because the Df's internal focusing motor makes it super-easy to put together a budget-friendly lens kit. After all, that's just what I'd done for my budget full-frame Nikon, the D700.
The focus motor bit is important. See, both Nikon and Canon had dabbled around with kludgy autofocus SLRs in the early 1980s (the Nikon F3AF and Canon T80) before settling on what are still their main DSLR lens mounts.
Canon went with their new EOS system and the EF lens mount. This introduced a larger-diameter mount which would theoretically allow for higher-performance lenses. It also severed any functional mechanical connection between the camera and the lens; the aperture diaphragm was now electromagnetically operated and the focusing was done by motors in the body of the lens itself.
While these changes made for more modern and efficient lenses and cameras, they basically meant that any existing Canon pro shooter with an FD mount camera was now sitting on potentially thousands of dollars...tens of thousands for a sports or wildlife photog...worth of dead-end lenses that would be useless on future Canon professional cameras.
Nikon took a different tack. They retained the same F-mount interface that their single lens reflex cameras had been using since the seminal F model of 1959. They already had a means of controlling the aperture on lenses by means of a lever in the mount, and to this they added a focus motor in the body that spun a little flat-bladed nubbin that protruded from the collar of the lens mount. This flat blade connected with a little slotted disc in the base of the lens and operated the internal focusing of the lens via screw drive.
To this day, it's how you can tell the consumer Nikon DSLRs that you can buy in boxed sets at Mart-Mart from prosumer and professional grade Nikon bodies: The latter still have the focus motor in the body, lo these thirty-three years down the road, while the former do not, in the interest of cost savings. The reason? Well, most Nikon lenses made since the late Nineties now have internal motors ("Silent Wave Motor" is Nikon's ad hype terminology.) People buying cheap DSLRs at Best Buy to take pics of JV soccer games and Alaskan sightseeing cruises are unlikely to be sitting on thousands of dollars of legacy glass, and worried about backwards compatibility.
This means that there's a lot of older, used high-performance professional glass that's available cheap on the used market because it uses the old screw drive setup. On a D7xxx prosumer camera, it autofocuses sluggishly, driven by a smallish battery and little motor, while on a consumer D3xxx or D5xxx, it won't autofocus at all, since there's no motor.
On a high-end camera, even an older one like my D700 or D3...or Jim's Df...the glass autofocuses with some alacrity, though. And if the old pro glass from the screw-drive era is cheap, the better consumer-grade stuff is dirt cheap.
My basic Nikon bag, a (now discontinued) ThinkTank SubUrban Disguise 30, I picked because it's compact, yet will hold an iPad, a DSLR with a few lenses, and can swallow even a big lens like a 70-200/2.8 if it's dismounted and stowed vertically.
The lens that lives on the D700 in the bag is a Nikkor 24-85mm f/2.8-4D. It's more compact and focuses closer than the 24-120mm f/4 VR, to say nothing of being much cheaper on the used market. Alternatively, I've used a Nikkor 35-70mm f/2.8D, but good examples are harder to find on the used market and you give up a chunk of focal length range.
The compact nature of the lens on the camera is important, as the D700 is carried lens-down in the center of the bag and beneath it, under a padded divider, and inside a neoprene lens pouch for added padding, I keep an old 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5D to handle wider-angle chores. There are faster and/or more rugged alternatives, but this one's plenty adequate and, again, cheap. It's also lightweight and works well on my older F4 film body. I'm not a frequent wide-angle shooter anyway.
To one side of the camera, in the vertical position, I stow a 105mm f/2.8D Micro-Nikkor, which is not only great for macrophotography, but is also a pretty decent portrait lens, too.
To the other side of the camera and also stowed vertically is one of my favorite lenses and the one that makes me happy that the D700 has a pretty torquey lens drive: an old "push-pull" style 80-200mm f/2.8 ED zoom. There's pretty much no cheaper way to get a rugged, pro-grade constant f/2.8 zoom lens, one of the cornerstones of the "Holy Trinity", on a DSLR, all because the old screw-drive focusing is considered obsolescent.
In the zippered pocket on the flap goes a battery charger and a couple spares, and spare CF cards. The iPad pouch on the back will hold my standard iPad in the Logitech type cover with enough slack to slip a Kindle in there as well. The whole thing goes under an airliner seat with ease, and also fits in the wire basket on the back of my Broad Ripple SUV like it had been designed to stow there.
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| Sorry for the potato image quality. I was one-handing a D3000 and a non-stabilized 35mm f/1.8 while kneeling on a wobbly stool shooting down onto the lid of the clothes drier. I really need to set up a dedicated home studio. |
So that's my traveling lens kit for full-frame Nikon. I have a couple others that get used a lot, most notably a 50mm f/1.4D for if I'm going to be indoors at a party or something and a 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D VR for the zoo, which I can substitute in as needed, but the entire basic 4-lens package that normally rides in the bag will cover most any shooting scenario and can be had for less than the cost of a middlin' decent Colt or Kimber 1911 by buying used.
