Just curious, why was it that the Iso need be so high? Was it late in the evening underneath a tree ? I can see a nice high level of detail , but for a 2.8 lens ..?? (I dont have a fast lens , and was considering one)
Yes it was in the evening and it was hand held. Also the aperture at 10 (see the exif) because I wanted some DOF margin for hand held that close, so to get my shutter speed up I had to raise the ISO. This lens in not VR either so you are losing a couple of stops there, too, which again made me want to get the shutter speed up.
This is a macro lens, and to get DOF you have to use higher aperture because you are so close to the subject. I was about a foot away. Alot of macro photography is on tripod, and if that was the case my iso would have been much lower. Large apertures are not that important for this, at least the type of pix I plan on doing. I don't believe Nikon has a macro lens more than f 2.8 because the DOF for this type of photography gets too shallow being so close.
You have to consider what type of photography you will doing with an upgrade in lenses. You can use this 60 for regular photography, but if that is all I wanted a prime for I would have gotten one of the 1.8G's. Still, you don't have VR on the nikon primes so you are losing stops there. I do sometimes wish I would have gotten the tamron 17-XX at a constant 2.8 instead of my 16-85 at I believe 3.5-5.6, but it is on rare occasions I wish I had something faster. I would always recommend a good zoom for flexibility instead of a fixed lens....most of us will never be able to tell the difference in quality or even need one unless you are into portraits or something (I'm not). This 60 will probably be the only one I ever buy for the type of pic I posted, unless I go to the 105 if I ever go to FF. Everything else is I do is zoom.