ChrisDM Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Marc Adamus wrote:
Primes are practically useless to me. Almost all of my photography is very hiking and backpacking intensive, and requires me to keep gear at a minimum. I can't justify having 6-8 different primes to cover the range I need, nor is 21mm wide enough for many of the perspectives I like to shoot. 3 lenses and a 1Ds III is already a ton to carry around when one's base pack weight can already be 30-50 pounds. I want to cover the 14-200 range in three lenses, tops.
Hi Mark, I'm a real fan of your work. I also backpack with a 1Ds3 for my landscape photography, and prefer zooms for framing. I also print large and have these prints represented in a fine art gallery. So my quest for image quality is not just "gear ego", but actual ego 
While I appreciate the new Nikon's optical qualities, I have no interest in lugging heavy 2.8 glass 8 miles up a mountain slope just to shoot it at f16... For this I've found the 17-40L to be ideal. It is wide, light and optically excellent. I also have dabbled in the "alternative glass", and while a Zeiss or Zuiko prime is sometimes technically sharper under a microscope, I didn't feel that the real-world results justified the extra expense and forfeiture of zoom convenience. Stopping them down equalizes them for all practical purposes... Nor can I get around the fact that I can't mount filters to it, which basically makes it useless as a landscape lens for me. Even though I typically handhold my graduated NDs anyways, I still love to use polarizers where they'll help. I had to handhold a circular polarizer the other day when I forgot my 72-77 step-up ring for my 24TS-E, and it was more trouble than it was worth, especially while trying to hold a grad on top of that!
Chris M
www.imagineimagery.com
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