D3100 lens recommendations for Motorsport requested

If you have until next year, I'd consider renting a few different lenses and playing with each of them for about a week. I'm sure you can go online to find some lens rental places in the UK.

As for Raw vs JPG... I'm sure the true experts will correct me but as I understand the RAW file is what the camera sensor actually saw. For JPG, the camera makes adjustments for light contrast color balance and such then compresses it into something that looks nice.

If you plan to do your own post processing, with Lightroom or Photoshop or whever else there is, I'd recommend RAW.

I never even thought of renting a lens, I'll look into it, thanks

hi kev i have the 55-300 vr kit lens and it is a great lens for long shots but i think get here is buy the fastes glass you can afford i.e. f1.8 the smaller the fstop the more light you Are getting in ,hence you can get away with a shorter shutter release= faster shots.you are correct about the raw vs jpg . jpeg the camera processor adjusts image.raw is what the cmos chip sees. a raw file is larger due to the increase in shading the sensor picks up. to quote some one here "your computer at home has more processing power than your camera so is it not better to let it do the adjustments ?"

Thanks Patrick, much appreciated. I posted some pics from Thruxton in my gallery that I took earlier this year with the 55-200 lens.

Cheers.

RAW is a direct output of the sensor with no corrections added, where with the JPG file format correction have already been applied such as sharpening, colour correction ,etc etc, and everytime you play with a JPG file and save it you lose more information EACH TIME you save the file as a JPG

Reading various magazines, and also N-Photo magazine (100% Nikon ONLY) it appears a few photographers set the exposure +1 or -1 and edit it back later as depending on the shot can reveal more detail, but you can only do this in RAW format without worrying about losing detail

I shoot in purely RAW as you can change pretty much everything AFTER you have taken the shot and don't have to worry about losing any information/detail from the image. Unless you shoot a lot in rapid succession RAW is preferred, I use class 10 memory as there isn't much price difference between class 4 or class 10 (the higher the class the faster the speed)

You can get even faster cards but they start to cost mega money very rapidly. A 32GB class10 card can be bought for around £20 if you look carefully


There is also an option to save in RAW+JPG so you get both formats