Mike:
I've seen a few camera threads on here before. You are going to get good information intermixed with bad information from the members, who, after all (with some exceptions), aren't photography experts.
Best bet is to educate yourself using one of the professional grade photography sites.
Here's one with a wealth of information, reviews, forums and how-tos.
Digital Photography Review
Successful photography is about having what you need to get the shot you want to get, when you need to get it.
You need faster lenses for lower light, and/or faster targets. If you go to a race track or a football game, you'll see the pros with 600 or 800 mm non-zoom lenses to get those far away shots of things that are moving rapidly. Zoom lenses are always a compromise vs prime lenses.
18-270mm is a massive compromise, and the photo quality isn't that good anywhere in the range.
That said, realize that if you are taking pictures for the web, you have to lower the resolution dramatically to get a photo on to a forum.
BTW, the lens numbers have nothing to do with the size of the stored image. They are about the image that the lens sees. I can have a long range lens, and still edit the photo down to low pixel counts for the actual stored photo image.
Computer screens don't have that high of resolution, compared to the photographic world.
Ever load a picture heavy web site that takes forever to load? That's because the web guys don't understand how it works, and the files are high resolution images that take forever to load. They get reduced anyway, so there's no point in having a higher resolution photo, other than to slow the load time.
People do that, even here on AGO. Whenever you see the banner at the top of the photo that says that it has been re-sized, the initial image is overload for the web. Mike Phillips always tells people to size their images for 800 pixels wide, but he doesn't frequently explain why. If you put a photo into the AGO photo library at 800, and then click it, you have a suitable image for the forum. If you click the large size first, you'll notice that the resulting image is marked resized. If you go too big, it will display as a thumbnail. If you go way too big, it won't load at all.
You already have a good general lens on your Nikon. I'd experiment and learn with that one before jumping into another
expensive hobby.
If you need to take distant photos, a 70-200mm (or 70-300mm) lens might be a good addition.
The 70-200 variety will cost you more, not less, but will be a faster lens that will work better in lower light conditions. You didn't really think that a flash or a light bar would help you with a far away shot, did you?
If you are doing mostly car photography, a faster lens (lower F-stop numbers) will get you photos in lower light conditions.
I have a variety of lenses, but the one that stays parked on my camera is an old 24-85mm Canon lens. (Now that I have all the lenses, I have to stay with Canon cameras). I'm still using my 10 year old 6 megapixel camera, because for the shots I need to get for web images, it's still massive overkill. If I have to go overseas again ever, you can bet I'll upgrade the camera.
Jim
