britkev
03-20-2008, 05:37 PM
Quick history: Started out photography in the early 70s with a Zenith SLR - model name/number escapes me. Moved up to a Pentax ME Super in the early 80's, lost interest in photography late 80s. Bought a Sony Mavica in about 99, couple of bigger better mavicas, Olympus P&S, Nikon CP5000, CP8000 then finally got into the DSLR world with a D50 just over two years ago. Someone else is presumably now using that camera having obtained it on the cheap from someone in the Orlando area after I had a momentary lapse of attention while herding my party of six, including two hyper-excited preschoolers, out of a taxi at the Magic Kingdom in Disneyworld.
It's an ill wind, however... my travel insurance company paid out quickly and generously so I went shopping and plumped for the D300, which arrived yesterday... bought it body only since I want to hunt for bargain lenses and none of the camera/lens packages that I could find in stock anywhere fit that category, and since I only lost my D50 with my 18-70mm I still have my 18-55mm, 50mm f/1.8 and bargain basement 70-300mm G to play with while I hunt for the right lenses at the right price.
Just taking the D300 out of its box was awesome... it looks, feels, even smells classier than the D50. Pretty much everything you would expect was in the box... battery, charger, strap, separate manuals in English and Spanish, warranty forms, Software CD, eyepiece cover, USB cable & composite video cable.
No plastic thingy to protect the flash shoe, and no HDMI cable :(
Had to once again endure the agonizing wait for the charger to stop flashing, since my two spare EN-EL3a's are no longer of any use to me, but I had at least had the foresight to go out and buy a 4GB Sandisk Extreme III CF card rather than try to use the somewhat antiquated 1GB one I have left over from my Coolpix days.
By the time I was charged up and had all my other responsibilities for the evening taken care of it was dark & raining and really no good for going anywhere to take pictures.
I will confess that it did take me more than a few seconds to figure out how to open the memory card door :o - look for the universally misunderstood symbol for "open" that resembles pacman bottom right on the back ;)
Shot off a dozen or so just messing around and was really impressed. That LCD really is enormous and ridiculously sharp. The shutter sound is almost musical compared to the clatter of the D50.
So I went to bed dreaming of my new toy.
This morning was rainy at first then dull and dreary, and I had a bunch of stuff to do, but by lunchtime the sun was starting to peer through the clouds, so the park was calling me. It might be the first official day of spring today, but it's still decidedly wintry around here... we've had a lot of rain lately and some of the pathways alongside the creek have been partially washed away over the winter and were very slippery in places. I was kind of nervous clambering along just feet above the swollen creek with more than $2k of delicate electronics slung round my neck... not sure my insurers would like me anymore if I totalled a second Nikon in less than three weeks ;)
Anyway... the camera...
after walking around for a couple of hours it is heavy... gonna have to add a nicer neckstrap to my shopping list (does it ever end? ;) )
The camera sits nicely in the hand, the controls are all comfortably placed, wasn't long before I was adjusting aperture/shutter while looking through the viewfinder, which really is beautifully clear and bright.
I'm definitely going to have to do some reading on how the Auto-Focus functions... it seemed to be fighting against me rather than working for me a lot of the time :(
Darn... Ch mode is like a machine gun. :cool: It really rips through memory cards... I tried a couple of bursts shooting large fine JPEG and counted about 31 or 32 shots at full speed (allegedly 6fps, and certainly not far short of it by my reckoning) before it slowed down to about 2fps.
When I loaded my empty 4GB card it was showing 356 shots remaining in Large Fine JPEG, I think - 328 shots in the can and it's still showing 190 left, seems like Nikon's normal pessismism in action here, so I'm guessing 600+ might be a realistic capacity. Battery shows no sign of depleting yet... I'm assuming that will behave in a similar fashion to the D50 battery meter: show full for so long that you almost forget about it but it then dives quickly to empty once it starts moving :mad:
I'll be sorting through my shots later tonight... don't suppose for one moment that there's anything I'll be submitting to National Geographic... there's limits on what you can find in an urban Philadelphia park on a partly cloudy day in mid-March: a few geese, ducks and daffodils... and I'm still using my "cheap and nasty" consumer end lenses so that's my excuse for now ;) - maybe I might find one or two to put up here.
It's an ill wind, however... my travel insurance company paid out quickly and generously so I went shopping and plumped for the D300, which arrived yesterday... bought it body only since I want to hunt for bargain lenses and none of the camera/lens packages that I could find in stock anywhere fit that category, and since I only lost my D50 with my 18-70mm I still have my 18-55mm, 50mm f/1.8 and bargain basement 70-300mm G to play with while I hunt for the right lenses at the right price.
Just taking the D300 out of its box was awesome... it looks, feels, even smells classier than the D50. Pretty much everything you would expect was in the box... battery, charger, strap, separate manuals in English and Spanish, warranty forms, Software CD, eyepiece cover, USB cable & composite video cable.
No plastic thingy to protect the flash shoe, and no HDMI cable :(
Had to once again endure the agonizing wait for the charger to stop flashing, since my two spare EN-EL3a's are no longer of any use to me, but I had at least had the foresight to go out and buy a 4GB Sandisk Extreme III CF card rather than try to use the somewhat antiquated 1GB one I have left over from my Coolpix days.
By the time I was charged up and had all my other responsibilities for the evening taken care of it was dark & raining and really no good for going anywhere to take pictures.
I will confess that it did take me more than a few seconds to figure out how to open the memory card door :o - look for the universally misunderstood symbol for "open" that resembles pacman bottom right on the back ;)
Shot off a dozen or so just messing around and was really impressed. That LCD really is enormous and ridiculously sharp. The shutter sound is almost musical compared to the clatter of the D50.
So I went to bed dreaming of my new toy.
This morning was rainy at first then dull and dreary, and I had a bunch of stuff to do, but by lunchtime the sun was starting to peer through the clouds, so the park was calling me. It might be the first official day of spring today, but it's still decidedly wintry around here... we've had a lot of rain lately and some of the pathways alongside the creek have been partially washed away over the winter and were very slippery in places. I was kind of nervous clambering along just feet above the swollen creek with more than $2k of delicate electronics slung round my neck... not sure my insurers would like me anymore if I totalled a second Nikon in less than three weeks ;)
Anyway... the camera...
after walking around for a couple of hours it is heavy... gonna have to add a nicer neckstrap to my shopping list (does it ever end? ;) )
The camera sits nicely in the hand, the controls are all comfortably placed, wasn't long before I was adjusting aperture/shutter while looking through the viewfinder, which really is beautifully clear and bright.
I'm definitely going to have to do some reading on how the Auto-Focus functions... it seemed to be fighting against me rather than working for me a lot of the time :(
Darn... Ch mode is like a machine gun. :cool: It really rips through memory cards... I tried a couple of bursts shooting large fine JPEG and counted about 31 or 32 shots at full speed (allegedly 6fps, and certainly not far short of it by my reckoning) before it slowed down to about 2fps.
When I loaded my empty 4GB card it was showing 356 shots remaining in Large Fine JPEG, I think - 328 shots in the can and it's still showing 190 left, seems like Nikon's normal pessismism in action here, so I'm guessing 600+ might be a realistic capacity. Battery shows no sign of depleting yet... I'm assuming that will behave in a similar fashion to the D50 battery meter: show full for so long that you almost forget about it but it then dives quickly to empty once it starts moving :mad:
I'll be sorting through my shots later tonight... don't suppose for one moment that there's anything I'll be submitting to National Geographic... there's limits on what you can find in an urban Philadelphia park on a partly cloudy day in mid-March: a few geese, ducks and daffodils... and I'm still using my "cheap and nasty" consumer end lenses so that's my excuse for now ;) - maybe I might find one or two to put up here.