Btw, I am 82 and not happy to carry big heavy lenses (600 mm) with me.
Shoot first, evaluate later. Too many years shooting for magazines convinced me that I should ātakeā a shot as soon as I can, and decide its merits (or lack of) later. If it turns out to be a useful photo, I then try to do better. Wasting useless photos doesnāt bother me nearly enough compared to wishing I had taken a photo immediately, before it was ālostā.
We have very different attitudes about this, and in the past, I found it useful to āshoot now, think laterā. Yes, Iām retired, but this is a habit that has grown stronger over time - and I hate it when I could have taken a shot, but didnāt, and later wished I had taken one. None of this applies to you, as itās not the way you do things - you donāt need to be in a āhurryā, but peopleās expressions are gone in an instant, after which itās too late (for me) to capture what I wanted. For me, itās a non-issue. I consider the āwastedā shots to be āpracticeā. 
There is a part of me that agrees with you, and another part that tells me Nikonās latest lens (70-300 P) has advantages. As a āwalkabout lensā, I agree - you are right. Hereās a comparison of the two lenses, and for me, both weight and distortion and quality are most important. I have no desire to change from my āPā version of the lens - have you compared the weights of each?
I know how convenient your lens is, covering such a wider range. That would be a good reason to switch, but the more I read, the more I prefer my choice. I understand that PhotoLab will probably correct the distortion, so for us, that is not an issue.
Both of us have all the time in the world, at home, to review all the menus and set them the best we can for US. Since Nikon felt it good to give us all these choices, why ignore them, when we have free time in which to do so? I also āhateā all those choices, and to be honest, I āhateā not understanding why to use any particular setting - or not. You keep surprising me with very useful information on now to get the most out of our cameras - which also has a huge influence on how I do things. I suppose I could also just return my camera to āfactory settingsā and leave it that wayā¦ but I donāt want to do that.
I hear that LOUD and CLEAR. When I did get to use my friendās Sigma 600 zoom, I didnāt even enjoy walking around with it. Maybe a lifetime ago Iād have felt very differently. I used to use my Nikon 80-200 a lot, but just walking around with it was uncomfortable. My new 70-300 āPā lens weighs a fraction of what my old lens weighed. Weight is right up there with resolution for a reason I might, or might not, buy a lens. Iām one click away from buying the Tamron or Sigma 600, but I think it will just sit at home in a drawer - while my Nikon 300 doesnāt even āfeelā heavy.
Yes, thereās only 4oz in it between the 28-300 and the 70-300P. Hardly with worrying about. And the discussion that you link to is mainly about the non-P version, which is considerably lighter than the P version, which is why folks talk about the large weight difference to the 28-300.
Do yourself a favour and beg, borrow or otherwise obtain a 28-300 and try it out. Youāll not be disappointed.
Because, for the majority, it gives them the once and for all chance to setup the camera. It really isnāt intended for changes between each shot.
In all the years we have been doing digital photography, from the first D100 to the latest D850, after initial setup, neither of us have ever had need to change the menus on a shot by shot basis.
You are simply making work and headaches for yourself.
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I am very good at doing that! No argument!!
When it comes to photography, I have never thought of things as āone size fits allā. I understand that this leads to compromises.
You are brilliant at what you do with what you have. To me, that brilliance is 99% because of YOU, not your equipment. You would come home from a trip with an old box camera with wonderful images. You would find a way to make it work despite any limitations.
If I find someone with a 28-300, I would love to try it out. Iāll ask my friend Ray Schneider whether he has, or had, one of them. If so, Iāll try it next weekend. My current āall in oneā lens is my Nikon 24-120, but it is Heavy with a capital H, and has lots of distortion for PhotoLab to fix. Itās nice that it includes 24mm, something I often find useful.
As to āwork and headachesā, I always seem to do that. Iāve been that way forever.
I have no desire to continue to argue, with anyone. Things are what they are, and for better or worse, my images speak for themselves. What needs improvement is ME, not my gear. No need to get a 600mm lens until Iām getting the most out of my 300.
My first serious digital camera was an Olympus E10, with a fixed lens and all of 4 megapixels. The place I was working wanted to enlarge them to around 16x20 for an upcoming industry show, and the specialty shop we took them to did this - came out beautiful, with lots of detail. They charged a lot, too. I remember that the megapixels in the E-10 were much larger than other cameras.
About your photo of the boardwalk at Santa Cruz - at a normal size, it looks great. As to a ādecent sized printā, that depends on what you want. Had you taken it with a view camera on film, that would have been much better of course. But on my screen, now, it looks quite nice. Nice composition, nicely arranged, nice lighting, nice colorā¦ Very nice photo.
When I was photographing the radio control nitro race cars, I had a list of settings that I knew helped me get better images.
For photographing static scenes, a park, a tree, a boat, a building, I always used a different set of camera/lens settings.
I am finding myself come up with a very different list of settings that might help me get better photos of birds ābird watchingā.
Even now, if I want to do night photography, again, a different list of useful settings.
Your ātechniqueā (trick? procedure? method?) of getting properly exposed images for images with bright highlights is something Iām now aware of, not that I use it all that often.
When I tried photographing an air show, again, a new list of ātricksā.
ā¦and then I wonder, if theyāre not useful tools, why do companies such as Nikon offer a gazillion settings that can be customized as desired?
Enough of this though. It seems to me that most things I (try to) photograph have their own unique settings to get an image I will be satisfied with. Perhaps thatās all due to my lack of experience, and making assumptions that may or may not be useful. The weakest link in any of this, for me, is āmeā. You, or others, make suggestions, which are usually very helpful. My magazine editors were especially helpful, as they knew what they wanted, and wanted me to give them. ā¦I should probably delete everything I just wrote. Everyone probably develops their own āstyleā for different things they do. Not sure why anyone should care about what I do, or why, but on the other hand, I am especially interested in what YOU do, and why - and for several other people posting here.
Nope, they are smaller bodyās.
And no slamm the door soundā¦
For example?
Again, like what?
Basically, from my experience, there are two main situations where you might need to change menu settings - when things are static and when things are moving.
You cite race cars, birds and air shows. Well these are all examples of moving targets. A bird is a race car that moves in three dimensions and a plane is just a large bird. Night photography is just day photography with longer exposures. The same principles apply and, at most, that means only two settings banks.
Features sell cameras. The more āfeaturesā, the more they can justify a higher price and user manuals that you can stand on to see over a fence.
Once again, think back to your film cameras - how on earth did you manage with no menus? Shooting moving subjects was is a skill to be learned, tracking ahead of the subject and using manual follow-focus. How on earth did Cartier Bresson manage?
Digital photography makes folks lazy. Instead of learning their craft (the making of images), nowadays, the first thing new photographers are encouraged by the camera industry to believe is that they have to rely on technology and understand how to micro-manage their camera. In reality, the first thing to learn is that the camera is a black box with a variable sized hole at one end and a means of recording the light at the other.
On the whole, menus are for techno-geeks who enjoy spending time fiddling with their camera, rather than getting out there and making images.
The only reason I have delved into the possibility of setting up a second settings bank is to allow me to switch to dynamic focusing but, after several attempts, I gave up because the settings were far too complicated and I couldnāt find a definitive answer as to how to effectively follow a moving subject without the ābrainā of the camera getting confused when the subject moves behind something.
Anyway, I donāt do enough action photography to make it worth the effort.
You are right butā¦ those settings always used to be, and can still be, made with judicious choice of ISO, aperture and shutter speed - nothing more.
Or, perhaps, down to your gullibility for believing everything you read about the ālatest and greatestā in technology, instead of honing your compositional and focusing skills without all the āgizmosā.
You already know the answer to that. We concentrate on making beautiful images with the bare minimum of complication and never looking in the menus.
Why? because itās more enjoyable to get on with the business of making images than to be too busy worrying about menus.
Letās assume that you are right, and I am just another gullible fool who has been encouraged by the camera industry, friends, posts, articles, and manuals to get overly involved with those several hundred possible settings to find the ābestā setting.
What do you think the result would likely be, if both of us took our Nikon body, restored the factory settings as the camera was shipped, and left it that way? Film cameras mostly required selecting three things, an aperture, a shutter speed, and focus. Ignore all other settings.
Plus ISO.
George
I donāt have a Nikon but apart from using the menu system to set the default file format to āRAW+JPEGā I donāt think Iāve ever bothered to tweak any of the numerous menu settings in either my Canon 400D or my Canon 90D.
Having said that, I do alter the focus points and the metering mode if the shot Iām capturing requires such changes but beyond that I find setting ISO, aperture and shutter speed on a per shot basis works well for me.
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Why ISO?
If weāre playing this āgameā for real, just leave the ISO at the default setting the camera came with?
Same reply - āwhyā?
ā¦if the shot Iām capturing requires such changes ā¦ The shot doesnāt require any changes, itās you that wants to make changes. ā¦just likeI doā¦ Other than exposure and focus, we all could leave the camera the way it came to us out of the box. Just like my old film cameras.
Me? I make changes all the time, to try to get my camera to do what I want it to do, and that is a very long list (for me), likely a shorter list for @Joanna. If less changes is good, no changes might be better?
Why do even that? The camera will create a nice image if you donāt touch that control.
ā¦I guess Iām trying to say we all have lists of things we will change, and some of us change more things than others. Does it matter? Do we NEED to change anything other than exposure and focus? ā¦I realize Iām just being silly, and I think I have reasons for anything I change from the default settingsā¦ didnāt someone say long ago just āf/16 and be there!ā?
Back to this thread, Iām often trying to do something ānewā for me, and the latest thing is bird photography, and I am 99% sure that the weakest link in my photographs has been me, not the camera, not the lens, nor the settings. Most of what Iāve learned in this thread has been how I can improve, not the camera, or the hardware, or the weather, or the lens - all of which are important, but my own weakest link is still me. All that other stuff is important too.
Which leads me. to think that the single most important thing I need to improve at, is holding my camera steady. Without that, everything else is wasted.
If you believe that then no wonder you struggle so much with stuff that people like @Joanna so patiently try to explain to you.
Iām not going to respond to any of your other replies to my post.
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You would never do that with a film camera. There is no default until you buy a roll of film, the ISO of which becomes the default until youāve used the whole film. Of course, with qn LF camera, you can change, not only the ISO but, whether it is colour or black and white and its tonality characteristics and dynamic range.
Not true with a lot of digital, like my D850, which is defaulted to JPEG. thatās like using Perutz colour film.
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This is almost getting silly, but yes, I did do that with my film cameras - I bought long rolls of Plus-X bulk film, and loaded all my own cassettes, so ISO was fixed at Plus-X speed for many, many years.
I was exaggerating - ever since I got involved in photography, because of experience, magazines, books, and friends, I started changing the default settings, especially when the world went digital. With few exceptions (mostly because of feedback from you) my cameras have most of the settings adjusted to what I felt was best for me.
I was obviously kidding about leaving cameras at their default settings, but I suspect everyone in this forum has adjusted their settings. As for me, Iām always open to suggestions for improvement, but mostly from people I respect or who create images I enjoy.
I apologize - Iāve lost track of which image you are referring to.
Itās also true that I often prefer images from the camera, before anyone edited them. ā¦and there are a huge number of times when I start editing an image, and scrap the whole thing, and delete what I started out to do. PhotoLab is responsible for some of this - I decide I donāt like the direction an image is going in, and revert to the original and start over again. PhotoLab didnāt screw up - I did. Usually, I learn something from mistakes like this, but not always. 
Iād like to add that PhotoLab has given me infinitely more freedom than in the past. I had to stick to a narrow range of some settings, before my images went all screwed, and while I always knew raising the ISO let me make changes I wanted to make - it was usually at a cost.
Now, I have a lot more flexibility because of how high I can go with ISO, letting me use settings I couldnāt get away with in the past. Thereās probably still a small penalty, but nothing like years ago. That, and auto-ISO I find very helpful at times.
Mirrorless cameras, and their technology, have now allowed photographers to do things that were much more difficult years ago. The closest I ever expect to get to a mirrorless is my D780, in Live View mode. ā¦and to be honest, I often think of going back to the simplistic M10, using it the way I used my cameras when I was a kid. Aināt nuthinā easy.
For a while now, Iāve wanted to take a photo of Miami Beach, similar to the promotional post cards from years ago, attracting visitors to come for a winter holiday. I finally had the opportunity to do so a couple of weeks ago - I saw this view, back-tracked a little to get the composition I wanted, and then made a few changes in PhotoLab to make it look like what I felt while standing there.
- I got the composition I wanted.
- I think I got the colors I wanted (post card style)
- No identifiable faces in the photo
- Lighting was fine, for what I wanted, and
- finally, full size, I enjoyed it even more.
It is intended to be a promotional holiday poster, not a beautiful landscape photo. Whether I will submit it for publication isnāt decided yet.
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Itās your choice. The choice only moved from the menu to the store when you bought the film.
And you use the ISO for the light meter.
George
I think i am not enough life on this forum anymore to grasp this.
To capture a image:
- highest level of exposure, brightest point.
- lowest level of exposure, darkest point.
- can internal DR, stops of the sensor deal with it? No? Choose which is more important.
- lowest required shutterspeed?
- DoF required?
-if one or both causes underexposure => correct with ISO value.
Ready ? Desired object still in the frame? Aim focus click.
Some of this decisions you can let done by algorithm these dayās and it does it often faster and as good as the person behind the camera so why bother to control this?
Gives the person more time for other important things.
The menu is for setting up the playing ground in which the camera may move around when itās helping you to get a propper image.
And presets are to have quick acces to usecase specific settings.
Birds? In BIF? Wel let go of low iso and set shutterspeed high.
Telelens? Set Aperture on sweetspot and keep it there.
Aiming and focussing is hard enough. Tracking focus can work if you have time otherwize just a centre box mode and burst and hope for the best
Birds on the ground? Silencemode. Electronic shutter.
Point focus point on the eye., sweetspot Aperture for maximum resolving power and wide enough DoF. Ios/ibis enabled for lowest iso possible, (shuttertime vs distance)
Why try to be back in the film age?
(i donāt watch old tube movieās either with a very low resolution on my 4k screen.) looks terrible.