My daughter has a Nikon D3100 and she's looking for a zoom lens which will also work well for sporting events. A sport/zoom lens I guess. Does anyone have any suggestions? Something in the $500 range. She's a novice taking photography in her first year of college. Thanks in advance.
The Tamron 70-300 VC USD is a good choice. It's a good focal length for most outdoor sports, it's sharp and focuses reasonably fast. Adorama has it for $349.
what sports? In what capacity? The Tamron is a very sharp lens but useless for indoor sports (because of the f5.6 aperture). I'm not sure "relatively fast" is a good description for it's focus speed - it's not an AF speed that is great for sports. And, it's important to talk about how she's going to use it. If she's a student at a major college and plans on taking shots from the stands, 300mm is woefully short so you could be spending a lot of money for fairly poor results with any 300mm lens