I like the crop factor because it essentially makes your optics better for free. Since it will only use the center of the lens, which is its best part. From your experience, does a speed booster actually have a large impact on optical quality, since you are adding an additional glass element?

Firstly, the Nikon cameras just use one mount, the so-called Nikon F mount. You can mount any sort of lens to a DX camera. I usually buy lenses from eBay, so that’s where I checked. I cannot talk about weather-proofing because I have no experience with it. I keep my stuff out of the rain. Maybe think about Buying a cloak in olive green or something that blends in with the natural environment to throw over yourself because it will cloak you and protect the camera and the lens from rain.

• Nikorr Af-S 200-500mm 5.6 ED VR ( AF-S in Nikon speak means the autofocus is internal, so it will be nice and snappy.)
• Nikkor AF-S 70-200 2.8 FL ED VR ( Used it will still be over budget for you, but the quality is absolutely worth it.)
• Tamron 70-200 2.8 DI VC G2 ( Basically the above lenses little brother.)

I think one of those three should meet your criteria.

Well, I wouldn’t say that one market is inherently stronger than the other. You can also buy a mirrorless camera for the price of one Pentax K70. Again, it just depends what’s better for your use case. If you only do wildlife photography and nothing else, a DSLR is the better choice because you get better autofocus for cheaper. But instead of a Pentax K70, I’d actually recommend the Nikon D7100. It was basically Nikon’s semi-professional offering, and the camera is great to this day. Also, Nikon’s product line for wildlife photography is just way better. An additional plus being that the Nikon Bayonet is the most supported bayonet for adapting. Since even with lenses that do not have an aperture ring, you can control the aperture on the adapter if you wish to adapt it to a mirrorless camera, for example. The D7100 also supports Nikon’s slightly older AF-D lenses. This just means the autofocus motor is inside the camera. That just means you sacrifice focus speed for cheaper wildlife lenses. Beyond the lookout for some AF-D Nikon glass. If you’re deterred because it’s older, look at few comments down. I had a conversation with a guy that basically recapitulates both perspectives.

While I agree with you that my claim was exaggerated, my claim remains true. While the differences you have outlined are correct, the differences for the photographer are basically negligible because it means essentially three things:

1. Better zooms
2. Better extreme wide angle optics (< 35 mm)
3. Yes, better coatings (which have a small impact on image quality, compared to optical design)

Well, before computers, all lenses were calculated using geometric optics, and these lessons are still true. The computer just makes it faster.

And on the topic of coatings, yes, we have gained fluoride element lenses, but what about thorium oxide doted lenses? Yes, you can’t use them on digital cameras because the radiation dosage will kill the sensor eventually, but if you have ever seen the image output of a thorium oxide lens, you know what I’m talking about.

Also additionally on the topic of them being bad, alright I’m getting the rare stuff out.

• Auto Rikenon 55/1.4
• Zeiss Distagon 35/2
• Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 58/2

And there are many more where that came from. Old stuff is useful. I’d genuinely like to see a modern post-2000 lens that has optical performance anywhere close to the outlined 3 lenses. Resolution isn’t everything, there are more qualities to a photographic lens. We are artists, not computers, needing the highest resolution lens for machine vision tasks. And I do enjoy more organic lenses, like three-element lenses. Yes, the resolution is rubbish, but everything else is great. The colour reproduction is insanely good, as is the micro-contrast, together with its brilliant, out-of-focus rendering. These are just qualities that you cannot get with an 11 element prime lens where every small bit of spherical aberration or transverse chromatic aberration has been tuned out because in the end you add more elements and kill some of the signal. That’s the natural trade-off and computers cannot fix the fundamental issue of absorption. You cannot buy physics, more elements mean more absorption. This will always remain the same, no matter if it’s 100 years ago, or in 1000 years, the laws of physics stay the same.

Tldr: If you only take away one thing, then just give old lenses a try. There’s no harm in trying the cheaper ones.

Edit: And also, yes, lightweight plastics means the lens will be lighter, but you pay the price in durability. And I will always prefer durability. Also, apochromatic lenses aren’t only possible because of computers. There are apochromatic lenses long before computers were a thing. Mostly today’s preferences have changed. Today means resolution at the cost of everything because that’s what sells products. But lenses are more than just resolution. They have many more qualities that are important as well for aesthetic photography. Again, we’re taking images for aesthetic effect, not for computers that need something for machine vision tasks.

My, my, you are asking a big question herehere are some to start out.

• Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50/2.8 (Soap bubble bokeh and three element goodness.)
• Auto Chinon 55/1.7 (beautiful, smooth and perfect bokeh You have never seen anything like it. They are quite rare, however.)
• Meyer Optik Görlitz Primoplan 50/1.9 (Beautiful micro contrast and very smooth gradations. Brilliant black and white lens.)
• Meyer Optik Görlitz Primotar 50/3.5 ( four element goodness. So, essentially, most of the organic qualities of the Jena Tessar, but with the more organic components toned down. Microcontrast suffers a wee bit under the additional element, but not too much.)
• Meyer Optik Görlitz Telemegor 180/5.5 (The long telephoto portrait lens. Enough said.)
• Super-Takumar 135/3.5 ( If you check online and find this lens for maybe 30 to 50 quid, you’ll think you’re insane and you made a mistake and you accidentally bought a way more expensive lens. The micro contrast and resolution of this lens is unreal, especially considering the price.)
• Nikkor 28-85 mm f/3.5-4.5 AF ( You can buy them dirt cheap for less than 100 quid online, and it is a good competent zoom. It even has a macro switch, so if you’re just starting out and want to spend little money, this lens is your go-to.)

All of these lenses should be readily available on eBay. I excluded the rare stuff.

Edit: And there’s much more. I still have a very limited experience with that. I have some more than I outlined. But believe me, there’s some great stuff out there waiting to be discovered. I also fixed a spelling mistake

Spend as much as you can on the lens. The camera is negligable. Listen to someone who made the horrible mistake of inverting that philosophy once.

Adapting with lens/camera communication usually does not work. There are some bayonets which can do it, but they are very, very limited.

Forget adapting anything to a DSLR. In all honesty, you really should buy mirrorless cameras. Reason being mirrorless cameras have adapters to basically every bayonet ever created. DSLRs do not. With DSLRs you are locked into the manufacturer of your DSLR for your lens choice, which may be very limiting.

Also, try to adapt manual focus lenses to your camera. Many of mankind’s greatest glass is manual focus only. Bonus is you can get a manual focus lens for dirt cheap, one that has quality that will blow your socks off. People think that old optics are inherently worse, which is false. Optics haven’t had any development since a hundred years, with a few minor exceptions.

Most of all, since I switched to GNU/Linux, I didn’t need to reinstall my system every single year to keep it performant, so after the first year it already felt stale!

My Personal Workflow

1. Offload everything from the memory card to my trueNAS into a descriptively named folder.
2. Darktable import and colour grading
3. Export and sharing
4. (Maybe if necessary VFX with GIMP)

You’re not seeing the edits you do in Darktable in Digicam because Digicam is a library application. You take a finished JPEG there and it will sort it by tags or things it sees in the image through machine vision, etc. Digicam cannot read the instructions Darktable gives in its sidecar “.xmp” files. Export from Darktable to JPEGs and put it into your Digicam folder. Then it will work out.

Edit: Fixed typo.

I’ll keep that in mind next time, thanks.