>>1248441Sorry, I got ahead of myself. The sensor does indeed matter. Nikons are great. Panasonics have notoriously shitty sensors. I have a Panasonic and I like it, but it produces gritty looking images. The better quality Nikons and Canons have brilliant sensors in them that will render a smooth gradient between highlights and shadows.
If you are really trying to get magazine-quality pics, a prime lens gives you top image quality for a small amount of money. Zoom lenses look bad by comparison unless you spend at least $3000 on them.
Sorry I don't have enough time to give you the full run-down, but here's a start:
>>1248438here you can see massive blurring and color fringing, up in the upper left corner the blue is starting to separate from the highlight on the grass. That's a sign of a zoom lens.
Most zooms will also cause barrel distortion or pincushion distortion.
They have nasty bokeh (circles of confusion) as you can see in
>>1248438 upper right hand corner.
The lens flare is much worse and light gets in the complicated zoom design and washes out the image. Probably why that image has poor contrast (blacks look gray)
If you are stuck with a zoom lens, try to find the sweet spot, which is towards the middle of the zoom range, but closer to the WIDE end rather than the long end. I think wildlife photography would be difficult with a prime, but you may be able to find some information about that. But the quality of a good prime will be a revelation to you if you haven't used one before.
For sharpening, try to do "creative sharpening" where you are only sharpening a couple of small details to give the overall impression of a razor sharp image.
