I persuaded Kathy to let me have an early Christmas present.
So, this weekend I've just taken possession of a new Nikon D60 Digital SLR camera.
As you know from one of my previous posts, I was brought up with manual SLR 35mm film cameras, and I loved the hands-on feel to them. I also wanted to stick with Nikon as I've been very pleased with the quality of photos they produce.
When I first got into the digital camera era I purchased a Nikon Coolpix 8700. I always wanted a digital single lens reflex (SLR) camera from the start, but at that time they were so very expensive.
As the digital cameras became more popular, so they became more affordable.
I have been quite conservative in my choice. Prices are still high for the super-duper professional photographer models that do practically everything you can think of (well, almost anyway.)
I chose the model that would best suit my needs - hence the Nikon D60.
I looked very carefully at the specifications, to make sure they ticked all the right boxes for me.
Although my Nikon Coolpix 8700 provided excellent results, there were one or two niggly things that got me frustrated.
(1) The first one was the array of button presses to navigate the menu system in order to get certain settings for a particular shot.
(2) The auto-focus was not very precise when taking photos of close-up objects, taking many minutes sometimes to get the precise focus. Although there was a manual focus option, again it was a series of button presses to get there.
In comes my saviour of the D60.
Number (1) problem has been taken care of. There are less buttons to have to fiddle with, so you can just get on with the job at hand, and that's to take pictures. The settings for particular
Scene Modes are now seated on the top of the camera next to the shutter release, in the form of a small dial. Just turn to the icon for the scene you want, e.g. Landscapes, and turn to the symbol of a mountain. All the settings are pre-set. No menus to scroll through whilst looking through the viewfinder. Much more intuitive.
Number (2) problem has been taken care of. Auto-focus mode is much more precise. In my test today I wanted to take a photo of a small flower in the middle of a bed of many other flowers around it. It locked on to the flower I wanted within seconds, and the result was fantastic.
It has a manual focus mode in the form of a small ring on the front of the lens, should it be necessary to use it in extreme conditions of awkward focusing.
The lenses are removeable, so you can add telephoto lenses if required. It comes with a 18-55mm lens as standard, which is suitable for most of my needs. The zoom facility is a turning ring on the lens, mimicking the old 35mm manual film cameras I so loved.
The sensor is 10.2 megapixels (as opposed to the 8 megapixels on my other Nikon), giving bigger and better results.
It comes with a 2GB memory card.
I've still got more testing to do, to go through all the different scene modes to see how they perform, but so far I am extremely pleased with it.
I'll share some of the new pictures in due course.
Laurie.
