My impressions:
When I set out to find my camera bag I had 2 requirements and 1 nice to have:

• Should hold all my camera gear for the foreseeable future
• When I go hiking I should be able to fit the rest I bring in the same bag (coat, lunch, book etc etc)
• Nice to have: ability to fit my laptop in so it can function as my airplane carry on luggage

Based on these requirements I choose this bag, and I am definitely happy with it. The first requirement is easy to fill, many bags carry all the gear I have or was planning to buy in the foreseeable future. This gear is a nikon D60, 18-55 lens, 50mm lens, 70-300 lens, small stuff (battery, lenspen etc).

The second requirement was harder. Most bags which will carry the gear won’t carry much else. If you are going on a hike or short trip this means that you will need to carry two bags around. The LowePro was one of the few which had a good size camera part, but also room for other stuff and even a special laptop compartment for if your laptop needs to join you.

The bag is also comfortable to wear. I took it with me for long hikes in the Swiss alps (easy tracks though ) and walked all day with it through San Francisco and I didn’t have any problems with it.
The only limitation I found was that the lens which is mounted to the camera body can’t be too long. I would have preferred to be able to mount my 70-300 while the camera is in the bag, in case an animal shows up unexpectedly.
Tripod:
The tripod I have (manfrotto 785shb) also fits into the bag. It fits nicely in the top compartment. To optimise the space I have the ballhead sticking out, but this is not required.

pro’s
• Large enough camera compartment
• large enough space for other stuff
• comfortable to wear

con’s
• longer lenses won’t fit (over 16cm)
• Camera mounted lens can only be 10 cm

A good bag is important as it determines what gear you will have with you when you go out to shoot. I can recommended this bag without hesitation.

Happy shooting!
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• ephotozine.com
• Photozone.de

The price is very decent around €180.

zoom
The main feature of this lens is the focal range 70-300mm. I bought this lens since I wanted to photograph animals and, as you have to stay away not to disturb them, a long lens is required. The sigma 70-300 comes in a number of flavours and you have to pay attention you get the right model. First of course make sure you have the right mount (Nikon or Canon,..). Secondly they come with or without motor. This is important if you own a D40 or D60 body. As they don’t have a autofocus motor in the body you need to have it in the lens. In online stores you often see it with a (motor) in the listing. Next there is the APO and non-APO variant. The difference is the quality. I got the APO variant.
My experiences
I am very happy with the lens except for some minor things. The lens is very diverse. A mistake, I was also guilty of is to interpret zoom as the ability to take pictures of subjects which are far away. Of course this is true, but moreover it narrows your field of view and compresses distance. This can be most clearly see when you take a picture of landscape feature which trails away in the direction of the line of sight. This can be a street (as can be seen in the last sample picture) or railroad track. A second to realize is that a long lens makes it easier to isolate a subject. As the field of view with a long lens is smaller (smaller angle) the background is less likely to contain distractions.
All in all I am very happy with the lens. The quality is good for its price. At least for me the quality of the lens is still better than my photography, so works me me fine. The only thing which annoys me sometimes is that it is not so fast to autofocus and that the autofocus is noisy. The autofocus being noisy matters as animals might be disturbed by the noise and run/ fly away.

Sample pictures

Cat portrait. 270 mm, F/5.6, 1/500s ISO 200

Pheasant. 300 mm, F/5.6, 1/400s, ISO 200

Flower buds. 300mm (macro mode), F/5.6, 1/250s, ISO 100

Street in Utrecht. 255mm, F/7.1, 1/50s, ISO 200

conclusion

pros
• compact
• cheap
• good quality for price

cons
• noisy AF
• slow AF

Here is a number of alternatives I considered, but didn’t take. At the end of the day I picked the sigma lens because within my budget it was the best lens I could get with the features I wanted.

• Nikon 55-200 VR

This lens is the natural companion to my 18-55 mm kitlens. When I tried it on in the shop on my own camera body however it was much slower to focus than the Sigma. On top of that the sigma is longer. The feature this lens had and the sigma hasn’t is the VR.

• Nikon 70-300 VR

I prefer this lens to the one I bought but the price was more double. The VR is the main feature in favor of this lens. It would mean you’d be able to take sharp hand held shots at lower light situations.

• Sigma 50-150

This lens is as far as I know alone it its range. It is a fast lens F/2.8 throughout the range, but very compact, not much larger that my sigma 70-300. The fact that it has a constant aperture throughout the range suggest better quality. The price was the killer again, also because to make it as long as the 70-300 a 2.0x teleconverter would have been required (making it F/5.6 100-300 or F/4 70-210)

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Why need a tripod?
You need to use a tripod if your shutter speed is getting in the area of 1 / the focal length of the lens. So if you have a focal length of 50mm you stand a good change of shooting a good picture at a shutter speed of 1/50s. If you use an image stabilizer you might be able to get a sharp image at 1/30s or slower, but if you need to shoot at slower speeds or want to be sure of a sharp picture, use a tripod.

D60 sigma 70-300mm at 170mm F/7.1, 1/50s, ISO 200

Which tripod?
Of course tripods are a pain in the <insert body part of choice> to carry around. You might be tempted to leave it at home, especially when you are just stating out and are not yet so sure if you really need a tripod.   So the most important thing is to pick a tripod you will actually take with you. Any tripod in your bag is better than the one at home. However they should still be able to carry the weight of the camera. So with this in mind I started to hunt for my tripod; small enough to fit in my bag, yet strong enough to support my camera and lenses.
After some looking around and trying them out in the shops I settled on the Manfrotto 785SHB.

Manfrotto 785SHB
It is a small yet sturdy tripod. Collapsed it only measures 36.5 cm. It is small enough to fit into my backpack! So no problem to carry it around. The ball head and joystick grip is handy and easy to operate. It also comes with a bubble so you know when it is level. Extended it reaches 114.5 cm which is high enough for almost all situations. As you can screw off the lower part of the center column it can go very low as well, 15.5 cm.
The big question however is if it can support my camera with lenses. It is rated for 1 kg. This means that my Nikon D60 with my 50mm prime or 18-55 zoom should work perfectly fine but the D60 with my Sigma 70-300 zoom would exceed the weight limit (with about 200g).

And true to the spec I had no problem whatsoever with the 50mm or 18-55 zoom. It carried is nicely. It also carries my D60 with the 70-300 zoom lens fine, but with some limitations: It will not lock when the camera is in vertical mode. The weight will simply make it point down. It does however work when the camera is horizontal, though you have to push the lock tight so it does not slip. With the 70-300mm zoom it is also recommended to use either time delay or remote shutter press as it is sensitive to vibration. The price is about €70 so not expensive

Conclusion
I recommend it without hesitation if you keep the limitation in mind. It works very well for me.

pro:

• small
• light
• sturdy

cons:

• only carries 1kg

Hope this helped you, if you have any comments well put them in the comment

Happy shooting
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• kenrockwell.com
• Photozone.de

I will focus on how this lens has worked for me.
To start off my body is the Nikon D60 which does not have an autofocus motor build in. This means that in order for autofocus to work the lens needs to have it. In this case the lens doesn’t so I don’t have autofocus. I knew this in advance but decided to took to risk. (It saved about €200). I found that after some practice working without autofocus is certainly possible. It takes some practice but it works fine. Important to note is that the body helps you in focusing. In the viewfinder the indicator which normally shows if the image is over or under exposed now shows weather you are in focus or not. If there are green bars left of the 0 point the focus is too close and if there are green bars on the right the focus is behind the metering point.

Thanks to the large maximum aperture (low F-number) you can easily play with shallow depth of field. (What is depth of field?) As an example at F/1.8 a subject 1.5 meters away has only 6 cm is in focus. At F/5.6 this is 20 cm. Another advantage of the large aperture is the ability to take well exposes pictures in low light conditions. I’ve used the lens to take family pictures inside without using a flash. Not using the build on flash results in better pictures in my opinions since they retain the natural light and no flash reflations etc.

Because it is a prime lens (a fixed focal length) the lens is very compact. The focal length of 50 mm is maybe not the ideal focal length. A wider focal length might be more useful for general photography, but the 50mm is very well suited for making portraits.

F/1.8, iso 200, 1/200s

Recommendation:
I love having a fast prime lens. This lens is also very affordable. If you have more money to spend and have a D40 or D60 (without build in focus motor) you might want to take a look at the recently announced Nikkor AF-S 35mm F/1.8 or Sigma 30mm F/1.4.

Pros
* large maximum aperture
* compact
* inexpensive

Cons
* No autofocus on Nikon D40/D60

Nikon D60
To start off I want to point your to other reviews. I only have one DSLR and never had any other so I can’t compare it to other bodies. Here are two links of in depth reviews of the D60.

• dpreview
• KenRockwell.com

Secondly I should mention that I bought the kit meaning the body (camera) and the lens (Nikkor 18-55 VR) as a package. It is very convenient when you start out to buy the bundle, but important to keep in mind is that the lens has a much bigger impact on your photo’s than your body.. So if you have the choice between a cheap body and a better lens versus a cheap lens and better body, go for the better lens.
Related to this if you buy your first SLR it is important to consider the brand. The reason why this is important is that, if you want to increase your range as a photographer, you will need more lenses. And it is important to know that not all lenses fit on all camera’s! The safest brands are Nikon and Canon they have been around and have a large set of lenses and plenty of third party manufactures make lenses for Nikon or Canon bodies (Sigma, Tamron etc). Pick either brand and you’re fine.

My experiences with the camera are good. As an entry level camera is is nicely compact. The amount of control I gained by getting this camera compared to my previous one is enormous. It doesn’t fit into my pocket but it enables me to make better photo’s. Besides control over settings like aperture and shutter speed, the colour response in much better than from my point and shoot. Colours are more saturated and more detail in preserved. All in all I am very satisfied.

One thing to note is that this camera does not have an autofocus motor build in the body. This means that the lens has to have one in order for auto focus to work. Many lenses do (for Nikon lenses look for AF-S) but not all. I have one such lens Nikkor AF-D 50 mm F/1.8 which means I have to manually focus it. This is by no means impossibe and the camera does have a focusmeter build in to help you, however it requires some practice and is hard to do with moving objects.

One other huge improvement over my point and shoot is the ability to take pictures in darker surroundings without the use of flash. The camera can go up to ISO value Hi (1600) but significant noise is already present at ISO 800.

Conclusion
The Nikon D60 is working out very well for me. It is a great entry level camera very well suited to explore serious photography. I have hardly ever felt that the camera was limiting me in the pictures I wanted to make.

pros
• affordable
• compact and light weight

cons

• Although it performs reasonably well in low light situations, it is not top of the class
• requires lenses to have AF motor limiting the lenses you can use.