I did want to refer back to that as well and add that it seems with RF lenses the R10’s servo autofocus is NOT continuous, and requires a half depress of the shutter button or using another for AF-ON anyway.
However when I have the adapter and EF 70-200 MkII attached, servo behaves in a continuous fashion - no AF button or half shutter depress required.
Interesting and weird. My EF 70-200 MkII behaves exactly like the RF lenses on both the R5 and R - it needs the AF-ON or the *-button to start focusing and it immediately stops when I release it.
Did another dig on the Google, found a post on DPReview where it turns out the R10 does have a continuous auto-focus toggle with a different label.
AF Menu tab 3: “Preview AF” (Enable/Disable).
I’ll check it out later when I am home and see what it is set to and double check the RF lens behavior. Since some settings’ values can be mode-specific I’ll see if I have it set differently in different modes.
So I was mistaken - after running a test and playing with the “Preview AF” mode, which was disabled in my camera by default - the EF was not running continuous AF but it was the IS that I was noticing.
The 50mm lack IS, but the 18-45 and 100-400 have it, however they are both so much lighter and also quieter that I have to put the camera to my ear to be able to notice it. With the 70-200 you can feel it, and hear it a bit - but that lens is a lot beefier and moving more mass internally. 635g for the 100-400mm and 1490g for the 70-200…
My ‘new’ 2nd hand D500 arrived yesterday.
It has been well used, but overall in very good condition with only a few very minor scratches in the paint and the rubber grips showing obvious signs of use.
I spent the best part of an hour going through the menu settings and changing them from the previous owners preferences - For now I have set it back close to the factory defaults and I will work from there, there is so much more I can do compared to the old D50 
Unfortunately it didn’t come with the factory USB cable, so I have ordered a replacement, along with a 64GB XQD card (I already had a spare 64GB SDXC UHS-II)
Time to get photographing. I want to use it as much as possible in the next month or two because I bought it from a store and get a 90day statutory warranty.
If I can suss out the wi-fi before the USB cable gets here I will post some shots.
Congrats on your new camera, it’s still one of Nikons best DSLRs, highly regarded by photographers around the world. I hope you enjoy using/learning to use it and I’m looking forward to your photos.
Every time I open the manual and read some more - “this camera can do what now???”
Mr Murphy is conspiring against me though. Yesterday I thought I would go for a walk and photograph some wildlife… but as soon as I have a camera in my hand - zilch, zip, nada and this is after all week of dodging kangaroos on our driveway, wombats everywhere and birds galore (Rosella’s, Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoos, Fairy Wrens, etc). To top it off, later that day I saw a female Wallaroo with her Joey (not endangered but not particularly common around here) and I didn’t have the camera 
The best I could manage is some shots of two of our Galloway steers.
This morning was thick fog…
Trees in thick fog with a wide angle lens can make a cool photo…
I feel your pain. I got a 6D last November, and have been so busy I’ve barely had time to use it!
That is something I am lacking, or is my 18-70 1:3.5-4.5 good enough for most landscapes?
You can certainly get some nice pictures with the wide end of that lens, here’s one taken with a 17-50mm lens on a Canon crop sensor camera set at 17mm (which should be pretty much the same due to the different sensor sizes):
This one is using the 17mm end of a 17-40mm lens on a full frame camera (the 6D), the long end of that lens is much more rarely used, at least for me, because it is so wide! On your camera this would be a 9mm lens I think, but IIRC Nikon made a 10-24mm lens which would let you do much the same thing…
I can’t find any really well composed wide angle landscape photos at short notice sorry. Galen Rowell’s work famously features such shots, if you’re interested (one with flowers in the foreground and mountains in the background comes to mind).
One thing to keep in mind with a wide angle is that where the camera is placed in realtion to the objects and people in the scene makes the photo, far more so than a telephoto lens.
Correction, I had the math wrong. On a Nikon D500 you’d need a 12mm lens to get roughly the same field of view as that second photo. So the 10-24 would actually get you even wider!
OK, that makes more sense now 
I think I will get used to what I have before I throw even more variables into the mix. 18mm should be more than wide enough for the moment.
hey thanks! also will check the other post you mentioned, probably should start at the top of this post and work my way down looks like lots of good info here.
There’s an iOS app called Depth of Field estimator that helps me a lot to understand what I need to do to focus. In theory.
@Derbysieger do you have anything on ISO and signal to noise ratios?
I want to get a better understanding of when I am asking too much of the camera’s sensor.
I have taken different photos at ISO-6400, which metered OK on camera, but have gotten wildly different results for graininess.
My last post in the pets thread of Rex, shows a couple that I think turned out fine and at a glance I wouldn’t think ISO was that high.
ISO and the final image output is going to vary a lot, with such variables as total scene illumination, RAW vs JPG (or whatever format your camera will output), overall color cast of the scene, etc.
Short version, testing is the best and easiest answer to figure out how YOUR camera does at high ISO’s. Set your camera up for your normal shooting settings (ie image format, corrections, etc) with a static scene, static lighting, and static aperture (preferably a mid-range one like f/16). Make sure the lighting is low enough you can get to your max ISO and start shooting working down in 1/3 or 1/2 stops. Needless to say, do this off a tripod. I recommend using a mirror lock up shutter release if on a DSLR, and regardless of camera type a remote release to trip the shutter to minimize camera shake as the exposure times get longer and longer. Have a nice contrast target for the autofocus and verify that it is keying off that target each time so the focus is consistent.
Here is the real important part unless you are just geeking out about the science and technology.
On the device you are normally going to using to show your photos (for most of us a smart phone or tablet), have a third party look through the images. Starting at lowest ISO (so in reverse order shot), ask them to go through the photos, and to tell you when they notice the difference. Don’t tell them what they are looking for or what you are testing, just say “the difference.” You are going to realize real quick what most people notice is about 5x-10x worse than you will. They are going to see phantom color shifts, focal changes, etc. A whole bunch of things which didn’t occur. With modern camera’s it’ll probably be in the 10K range before people start commenting on grain. Ask them which pictures they feel are unusable, you may well be in the 25K range, depending on their artistic tastes. If viewed on a cell phone it may well go higher.
Pixel peeping on a 36" monitor can be fun, but you are going to drastically limit yourself on what you consider “acceptable” if you do that.
If you are consistently at the same location (I’m at Circuit of the Americas a lot) or same general environments (graduation photos in the Texas summer) you can run the same test on site to see if you have any changes.
Thanks for that. Very informative.
For now I have had ISO set to auto and shooting in either aperture or shutter priority, but I might have to do a bit of experimenting.
Speaking of shutter speed. As a ‘rule of thumb’ I have always used 1/focal length for my minimum/slowest shutter speed for handheld photography. i.e. if I am using a 300mm focal length lens then the min shutter speed is 1/300sec
But that is harking back to my 35mm wet film days. Does the same hold true for modern DSLR cameras?
The reading I was able to find explained that raising ISO will improve signal to noise ratio if the shutter and aperture remain constant, as you are increasing signal gain with the same amount of actual light.
Where as if you take an increase in ISO in order to drop exposure via either/both faster shutter speed or/and smaller aperture to maintain exposure, you are reducing the signal to noise ratio as while you have increased gain in the signal amplifier, you are reducing the actual light getting to the sensor - so relatively the signal’s noise gets more of a boost than the signal itself (incoming light).
I like to understand the science as best possible, but I did take up your recommendation to test as well.
The results corroborate the above statement very obviously, I went and set aperture and exposure first to avoid highlight clipping at ISO-12800 and took photos dropping 1 stop of ISO each time to ISO-800, with the shutter and aperture constant. Afterwards, I did another run set to avoid shadow clipping starting at ISO-800 up to ISO-12800. (RAW+JPEG)
I then brought the set in to Lightroom and did a quick slide on the exposure slider to brighten the darker images up and the darken the brighter ones to the other end’s level to see the results. What I got was overall the noise is fairly constant when pixel peeping, but what really stood out what that taking an image with ISO-800 that is very underexposed and having to brighten it, makes for a mess of grain/noise. Where as I can take an image from ISO-12800 that is overexposed considerably, and darkening it results in a much smoother image than the other way.
Going back to my prior mentioned images (the other set are of my buddy and his motorcycle, so I won’t post those) - my dog in our dimly lit hallway was also a lower overall contrast image, where as my buddy and his bike was shot on the side of a road, at night (10PM), with light bleeding over from the other side of the road’s parking lot. No tripod in either case.
Dog: EF70-200mm F/2.8 @ 125mm - 1/100s, f/2.8, ISO-6400
(perhaps ~1 stop underexposed result, histogram has room to either end.)
Bike: RF50mm F/1.8 (no IS on this lens) - 1/30s, f/1.8, ISO-6400
(perhaps ~1 stop overexposed result, histogram reaches both end of the scale with minimal clipping but heavy shadows - perhaps too much contrast here. His bike has a lot of chrome and I might have done well to try using a CPL.)
As well, I guess you are not going to notice color noise in the coat of a German Shepherd, but will in the solid colors of skin, clothes and a bike’s paint job.
I have been hearing this even for the digital, and still even in the mirrorless age. Image stabilization, especially if you have in-body IS (IBIS) as well as the lens IS, can let you stray to slower shutter speeds.
Panning shots break the rule if you want to really show motion blur in the background with a slow shutter speed, but require skill to move the lens at the speed of the subject to avoid subject blur. I have only tried that a couple times, and thankfully for high-speed continuous shooting at 15fps I got a couple keepers.
