Originally posted by akptc Good question about my photo targets:
- landscapes and landscape details (wide and long tele)
- birds while visiting wildlife preserves, probably no birds in flight (long tele +TC)
- village and urban architecture (wide mostly?)
- interiors (not much of that) (~fast wide-ish)
- street life, street festivals (wide to short tele I think)
- friends goofing off (wide to short tele)
- spectacular shots from and including the sailboat (wide, WR)
- possibly some macros, starting to seriously consider the 90/2.8 Tamron; only other AF macro I have is the 50/2.8 Pentax
I expect variable weather so WR would be a benefit to have on all/most gear.
I currently really enjoy using primes as opposed to zooms and prefer zooms with wide/grippy focus rings, not those flimsy 1 cm ones.
I have some big trips planned for late this year and next year, so I am doing the same as you, thinking through my kit well in advance. And I am taking a few short trips to test my combinations. I have learned a lot through experimenting with various zooms in particular. On the trip I started yesterday I have the kit discussed by pres589, 15mm, 18-135mm and FA50/1.4. I am already noticing the loss of long lens to isolate features in the scenery, and birds are very hard to catch, so I would add the 55-300mm to this kit, and maybe a macro (Tamron 52BB 90mm in my case).
Modern zooms can be really good optically, enough to convince me that the 55-300mm PLM is definitely my choice for a long tele - it's much lighter than your 300mm and easy to focus. I use this lens for bird shots, and then crop the images if I need to. I share your discomfort at skinny focus rings, but the autofocus is now so reliable that I would trust it on my travels, therefore the focus ring is almost unnecessary.
I have both the 16-85mm and the 18-135. The 16-85 is sharper and focus is quicker, but you could keep the 16-50 unless you want to spend $500 to save 200grams.
Primes are very personal preferences. I do lots of outdoor work, and I find that old M-series 28mm serves me very well, seems like you have the 31mm which is a close enough focal length. I have eight lenses in the 40-55mm range, for travelling I would choose the FA50mm f1.4 because it is sharp, auto-focus and just a little bit tele. You have covered these with your fast-ish 16-50mm and the two Limiteds.
So with the above reasoning I end up agreeing with Sandy and Hattinfatt in replying to you - take all your Limiteds, your 16-50 zoom, get a light 55-300 WR zoom for birdlife. The only risk is that the tele zoom is the only lens that is really WR. For the times when you are on the water, you could buy a very cheap 18-50WR or 18-55WR, leave in your car or hotel until WR is really needed and then sell after the trip. That tiny light 18-50WR has never appeared in Australia, so I am not sure how good it is, but it is very light. For the high-risk days you compromise slightly on image quality to protect your valuable equipment.
If you aren't expecting to do much macro, then consider a good quality add-on lens to screw into your 77mm, should cost you about $10 and is much smaller a dedicated macro lens that you might use only a few times. At about 50g you can carry this all day every day.
Your trip sounds pretty amazing, please let us know what you decide to take, and then how the lens combination worked for you.