Focal length and filter exercises

A closeup of the toy's face at 55mm macro.

A 200mm shot of sculpture atop the opposite building

A macro shot using the 200mm lens at 145mm. The ability to narrow down the focus with the long range lens renders the background window pane that is 2-3 inches behind the bee-doll in a blurry way to give more prominence to the focused subject.

An exercise on applying filters. Above is the original macro photo shot at 55mm. Below is the same photo with Red enhancement filter applied, which is one of the camera's inbuilt postprocessing options.

Helpful links on digital photography and the D60

Nikon's own D60 tutor site with entry level tutorials: http://www.nikondigitutor.com/eng/d60/index.shtml

A nice and helpful blog I encountered, maintained by professional photographers. Here's their online book on basic nature photography:
http://www.cameraontheroad.com/?cat=102

Hello, D60

I played around a bit and got to click this photo with the camera itself using 2 mirrors, which is noticeable in the aliasing of letters.

This grid compares the Nikon's sensor (left photos) with our Sony DSC 4.1MP's sensor (right photos). Nikon is able capture the room's ambience as it really is while Sony is able to slurp up only a fraction of the available light.

This is a crop of a photo taken with the Sigma 55-200mm lens with full-zoom, statically placed and shot with self-timer to avoid camera shaking in my hands. The doll was 10 feet away from where I shot the snap. The image can be improved by using a higher JPEG quality level setting but the texture of the 1.5 inch carrot can still be seen.

With a small test of field view comparison, I can preliminarily conclude that the zoom of the lens at 200mm is similar to that of my old 10x Samsung binocular's. So to me it looks like, 200mm lens == 10x zoom.

This shot was taken in complete darkness with the Sigma lens at 55mm with self-timer and static positioning. The camera took all of the 30 seconds (max exposure time) to finally give this shot - for a moment I thought the camera was 'hanging' but finally I heard the shutter close. The faint light came through the window from the sreet lamp. This shot was auto-calibrated to be shot at ISO 400 sensitivity (checked this in the image properties using the camera's playback). The 10.2 MP image had enough pixels in it to correctly render the dimly lit dwarf and pig dolls (to the left of the upper shelf).

Nikon D60: Diamond in monkey's hands!

The feeling that I right now have is not dissimilar to the essence of the kannada proverb, "Mangana kaili MaaNikya", the title of this blog. With a new, highly sophisticated "entry-level" (just to scare novices like me) digital SLR camera - the Nikon D60, finally out of the box and in to my untrained, eager hands, I just can't wait to explore its capabilities!

Single Lens Reflex technology equals mind-boggling photos - with that expectation set, I will begin a learning journey that I hope to catalog on this blog with pictures and observations. Hopefully, I will even get to try out other SLRs and compare their strengths with our Nikon D60...but to begin with, I will stick to some standalone, "Hello, World" tests.