DinoAdventure said:
Anyone care to suggest some online reading for me on how to use this thing? My current camera is point&shoot for the most part, so I'd like to start learning about all of the adjustments and stuff. I thought about buying a book or two but then I remembered that I have no money left after buying the D50
Thanks again everyone!
Cool! May you get many hours of pleasure out of it.
The best advice I can give you: play. For instance, try setting up a shot with items in the foreground and background, and experiment with the settings. Use the aperture priority mode (on Canons, it's marked as Av; your camera may differ, being a Nikon), and take the same shot -- camera in the same position -- with different apertures. Notice how the depth of field (how much of the shot is in focus, versus how much blur you get in the background) changes with the aperture. Then play with the zoom: take a shot of a single object at the same size in the viewfinder, but with different amounts of zoom, and notice how the background changes as a result.
Then try shutter speed priority (Tv on a Canon; don't know what Nikon marks it as) when you handhold the camera. Notice, as the shutter speed gets slower and slower, how it becomes harder and harder to hold the camera still enough for long enough to get a non-blurred shot. (Rule of thumb: the shutter speed should be 1/focal length or faster to avoid camera shake.)
Play with the ISO setting, and observe how the noise level changes. In short: fool around, and learn how each setting affects the shot. You'll learn more that way at this stage than by reading any book or online text. And since it's a digital camera, there's very little cost in doing so, compared with a film camera.
Good luck, and start saving -- you'll probably find you want more lenses down the road, and (if you're going to be serious about it) they cost a
lot of money. But, if you're going to be serious, you'll find that you're better off plonking down the great big wad of dough for the good quality lenses than buying the cheapest lens you can find with the range you want.
Above all else: enjoy.
