First of all, congratulations on getting your D700! It is an awesome camera and one very capable of producing awesome images. It has been my main camera for many years and it has never let me down. As my eyesight deteriorates (especially in my right eye where my central visual acuity is quite bad due to macular pucker in that eye) I increasingly rely on autofocus. I used to have a D300 before I got the full frame D700 so had an assortment of DX lenses. But I needed FX lenses when I bought the D700.
Here are the 3 lenses I bought when I became the owner of the full frame D700:
16-35 f/4 VR
35-70 f/2.8 D
70-300 f/4.5-5.6 VR
I didn't want to invest beaucoup bucks into the 24-70 nor did I want to carry it around. Instead I opted for the much older, cheaper and lighter
35-70 f/2.8D. I found out that it used to be Nikon's top professional mid range zoom in the 90's before it was replaced by newer lenses. It's a bit quirky because you change focal length by push-pull but once you get used to it, it works fine.
I found that my choice of lenses covered the entire range from 16mm at the wide end all the way up to 300mm. Though the 70-300 is not known as a birding lens, I've even captured adequate, though not fantastic, images of birds in my backyard. At Glacier National Park this past fall, I even was able to get an image of a grizzly bear that was understandably far away.
The 60mm Macro lens is one that I own and have used a lot in the past for my underwater photography. I'm not using it so much these days and I'd be happy to let you borrow it if you want to try it out.
For macro lenses, an even better performer, and one which I own, is the 105mm f/2.8 VR. It's an extremely sharp lens and I've used it a lot for macro photography, even though it's a bit heavy.
I have a couple of manual focus lenses including the classic 105mm 2.5 AIS.
It's pretty easy to enter manual focus lenses using the menu of the camera. As I recall, I think you can set up to 5 different lenses, but don't quote me on that.
I would definitely always shoot in RAW. This really helps to get the best possible images. If you don't want to be bothered with post processing for some shots, you can set the camera to shoot both in RAW and in JPG.
You should definitely make sure you have the latest firmware in your D700.
See this link:
https://www.nikonimgsupport.com/na/NSG_article?articleNo=000028188&configured=1&lang=en_SG
As you probably know by now, the camera uses the Compact Flash memory cards, not the SD cards that seem to be used by more cameras these days. Be aware, if you're thinking of buying a large capacity CF card, that the D700 cannot accept the really large capacity cards. I found this out the hard way when I wanted a card that would hold a lot of raw images when I was shooting the eclipse. I bought one but it wouldn't work in my D700. I think cards up to about 64MB should work fine in the camera.
Finally, I realize that you said you're not a low light shooter, but that is a great benefit of a camera such as the D700, especially compared to my DX D300 (or other DX cameras). I've found over the years that it works very well in low light situations that you may find yourself in either unintentionally or on purpose.
In short, you're most definitely not a traitor. The camera will be a great addition to the other tools you use for shooting.
