Say Cheese

Nikkor 70-300mm f4-4.5 G lens at around 200mm. The further you venture into the telephoto of this lens, the softer the result. Bjørn Rørslett observed, 'Optically speaking, the 70-300 isn't really that bad and given you avoid shooting distant subjects with the lens set to the longer focal lengths, quite decent image quality can be obtained. You need to stop down a bit, to f/8 or so, to get the best quality. Colour fringing is not a big problem despite the lack of ED glass, but colour saturation won't reach up to ED lenses'.
Where I went wrong here: ISO set too low (200) and aperture too wide (f/4.8). With a telephoto lens I think a high-ish ISO is justified even on a bright day, so that you can shoot at a smaller aperture and a higher shutter speed.