Saturday, January 17, 2009

Nikon D60: New Camera Kit

My new camera, the Nikon D60, arrived earlier this week on Tuesday. I was hoping to spend some time getting familiar with a few of the manual controls - but that didn't really happen. I've played with it some, but that's about it. I guess I'll be on full auto mode to begin with :)

I bought a pretty neat little case for it. It's got decent padding and no pockets on the front/back, which keeps it narrow for placing in my backpack. The aim being more comfortable on the hill... I picked up a filter too, to protect the lens from nasty people who think it's funny to spray someone holding a camera with snow, plus any other potential damage. Not sure it the fact that I bought I cheap one will make any difference; I'll find out soon with a couple of comparison shots, with and without the filter.

On that note, I took a photo of my new camcorder handle with both the new camera and my old compact. Take a look at the difference:

Compact.

SLR.

Probably not a great test for a number of reasons, but it's still a test. The D60 shot was taken using jpg, on normal quality (basic, normal, fine), at the medium size. The compact was on it's finest quality, at medium image size. Obvisouly I wasn't thinking too hard about doing a test here - actually, I was taking a picture of the handle and thought "I wonder what the same photo would look like on the compact"...

That said, I'd still say the Nikon kicks the compact's ass.

Of the few people-photos I've taken I'm pleased with the quality. I should have some good photos from this trip to Morzine, so right now, I'm not gonna spam my blog with photos of my mum and dad :)

One thing I have noticed whilst using the camera on auto mode is that the depth of field is really narrow... just a side thought. I'm gonna have to learn to use this camera properly, but in the mean time, the point and shoot results are great!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hoooooray! It looks great :) So glad you went with the Nikon.

BTW, start playing around with the D60 on Aperture mode ('A'). Set it to a really low aperture (e.g. maybe 3.5 or 4.5 or 5) and you'll see how nice the depth of field looks! Esp. for people photos.

Using automatic on those cameras you won't really find much of a difference between it and your compact :)

Gavin Hope said...

Hey Allie,

I'm glad I got the camera! We've taken quite a lot of photos while we've been away, mainly for the review, and some of them are great!

No time yet to play around with it, so all taken on auto - yeah I know I suck!

Still, the colours and detail are pretty sick!