Seems like with the way I'm shooting, the lenses I currently have make quite a lot of sense. I'm still on edge about the 16-85mm (its performance isn't consistent and I'm willing to accept that it might be my fault a lot of the time, but I am starting to think it's just not a 100% reliable lens and not something I'd be confident taking as my only lens on a walk-around especially if it's not bright and sunny). If it's bright and sunny I'm confident in it though. However, my 70-300mm Nikon lens (yes, I got it against what everyone here said) is sharper across the board, and I absolutely love the lens... I picked it up for $415 on sale brand new... while I do wish I had the 70-200 or 80-200 f2.8 lens, it's just out of my budget range anyway, and the 70-300 really performs so well and gets the level of Bokeh, sharpness, contrast, etc, that I want. The shot of the hornet is at 300mm and the raw file is really easy to work with, and is super sharp.
I'll be shooting lots more and learning lots more, but I think the 85mm 1.8G is the next lens for me.
An 'ideal' lens line-up I suppose would look like a 17-50mm f2.8 constant aperture like a Tamron or Sigma, a 70-200 or 80-200 f2.8 constant aperture lens, the 70-300mm for walk-arounds (I really really enjoy it! I feel like a heavier 70-200 wouldn't replace it), and then the primes. The 24-70mm f2.8 lens is sooooo expensive but it looks really nice as well. My 16-85mm I'm still learning and understanding better. Of course, in this paragraph, I'm just talking in theory... I like wrapping my head around everything and drooling at stuff that I can't even operate to its fullest potential. I no longer regret not getting the Canon 6D, though that ISO performance still leaves me curious... and I'm really appreciating lens quality over the camera body (though maybe I'm being spoiled by superior entry-level specs on current-gen cameras). I'm not sure how much I'm missing over a full-frame camera in terms of true depth-of-field to focal length, but I am left thinking that there are distinct benefits by using a crop-sensor (just getting that extra reach out of lenses like the 70-300); I thought in the back of my head the 70-300 might end up being useless and just for wild-life, but it serves as an amazing lens for getting a lot of the family shots that I want... I find I'm shooting between 135 and 270mm, and even into 300mm, quite often... and the results are fantastic. The VR on the 70-300 blows my 16-85 out of the water oddly. Maybe I just got a perfect copy of the lens.
All-in-all, I'm enjoying the learning process. I'll continue to try to learn more. I think I'm starting to shoot in the appropriate settings, and my current focus will be to learn more about composition (angle I shoot at, where I shoot from, and what I put in the frame -- whatever the technical term for all that is), as well as how to tastefully edit photos (since I don't know if I butchered my hornet photo or enhanced it).
This post was edited by Canadian_Man on Jul 22 2013 12:39am