Mostly about my amusement

Tag: D60 (page 2 of 2)

Memorial Day Weekend

More USS Kearsarge

This was one busy weekend.  Friday and Saturday was spent going and coming back from Strasburg, PA.  Sunday we had a family BBQ with friends over.

Today we went to the city and saw the USS Kearsarge.  It’s in port as part of fleet week in the city.  Lily took our son last year Friday before Memorial Day.  This year we had too much going on and had to go today.

Memorial Day is a busy holiday alright and it was a mad house.  All fun and cool, but the ship was packed with people.  You can see the photos I have uploaded to Flickr here.  We went with both kids and my brother Alek.  After I shot over 100 pictures, I lent the camera to Alek and together we shot almost 400 pictures.

The kids are in energizer bunny mode.  They napped on the ride back home and now they are ready to go again.  Me and Lily are just plain out.

Tomorrow is back to work.  After going to Strasburg and walking in the city, I plan to pick up a Lowepro 200 backpack.  Carrying the camera using the stock Nikon bag was a drag.  It’s not meant for walking around with.  A back pack means more comfort and less pain.

I mean, why spend the money on a DSLR kit if you are not going to carry it around and go nuts with it?

I got the Nikon D60

Old Trains from Strasburg, PA

Well that was not too difficult.  After doing some shoping we went to Costco and picked up the Nikon D60.

We went the next day to Strasburg, PA and I took about 300 pictures of the kids and the trains.  Got back today and used Paint.NET to touch up some of them before uploading them to Flickr.

Paint.NET rocks.  Once I got into a work flow, croping, rotating, and adjusting the colors became a breeze.  You can see what I’ve uploaded at my Flickr page.

To Digital SLR or not

I’m not a camera person.  I have a really good memory for events and like to talk to people. I can’t show people what I saw but the telling is very entertaining.

This really means I take lousy pictures, mostly because my hands shake. Using a small camera like our Canon SD400 always get a poor photo.

One of my brothers is a genuine camera enthusiast.  His current camera is a Nikon D80 and he looks longingly at the D300.  If he won the lottery he’d go nuts and get a D3 with a whole compliment of new lens, new flash, tripod, etc.  You can see Stefan’s work at his Flickr page, he really enjoys working with his camera.

Doing his civilian duty to boost the economy, Stefan has been successful at getting co-workers to purchase DSLRs.   One of our co-workers recently got a Nikon D60 and let me play with it.

It’s a remarkably comfortable camera.  The package came with two VR lens and just for goofs, I took some test pictures by zooming the 200mm lens out, standing in my most awkward pose and shot a photo of a sign.

The picture was very stable, no blurriness at all that I could complain about.  Playing with the aperture size, ISO, etc, got me different yet cool results.  I played with the 15-55mm lens as well; the D60 is targeted at people like me who are thinking of getting into semi-serious digital photography.  Since I’m not clever enough to just rest the camera, the VR lens are great.

The owner of the camera had shot over 900 picts in only a couple of days; I could easily see my self tormenting the family taking lots of pictures like that.

I had no idea what I was doing but it was pretty entertaining to me.  So now I am thinking about pricing out that D60 package.  We’re planning a couple of trips with the kids and being able to post decent shots would be a bonus.