This is much harder than saying goodbye to my 70-300mm VR.  I am selling my D90 in the next few days to pull together what I need to pick up the D700 next week.  I am so excited to make this upgrade but I am sad that it is at the expense of this camera.

Please click on the photograph for a nicer rendering of the image or to purchase a print.

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I’ll be honest.  My brain is fried.  After poking around the house for a bit trying to find something interesting to photograph for today I thought to myself, ‘hey, why not take a photograph of your camera”.  I know.  Lazy.  I promise I will do better tomorrow.

Click on the photograph for a nicer rendering of the image (I won’t be upset if you don’t today).

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I don’t remember exactly where I saw my wife’s name in an article about cameras but I immediately turned to Google to see exactly what was going.  Turns out that the photographer was talking about his Miranda EE (a 35mm camera that was introduced in 1971) in the piece.  I quickly turned to the pages of eBay and landed one for myself (with a 50mm 1.8).  Of course I had to have a camera with my wife’s name on it and she was equally excited because she admitted that she hadn’t seen too many things with her name on it.  Win – win !!

I have taken two rolls with it but have yet to get them developed.  Maybe I will get around to that this weekend.

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A colleague of mine recently came to me expressing his interest in moving into the world of digital photography by purchasing his first DSLR.  As a lifelong Nikon point and shoot owner, he started digging into the current line of Nikon DSLR cameras.  As a Nikon user myself, I was happy to help him out.

Quickly he narrowed his decision between the D5000 and the D90 originally leaning toward the D5000 from a price standpoint but after comparing the bodies side by side my recommendation to him was to get the D90.

Here are my four reasons that I would spend the extra $150-200 on the D90 over the D5000 and why you should too:

• The lack of a selector wheel on the front of the D5000.

This was a missing feature that drove me nuts when I first learned what I was doing on my D40x.  It prompted me to step up to the D80 within only a few months after my original purchase.

• The D5000 does not have a top mounted display.

I know that with both camera bodies you have the option of viewing this data on the LCD monitor on the back of the camera but personally, I don’t like using the LCD to display the information.

• The D90 has a built in motor for non AF-S.

Autofocus lenses that are not AF-S will only work in manual focus mode with the D5000.

• The D5000 feels cheap.

Simply put, the D90 feels much more substantial and sturdy in your hand.

These reasons may not seem as important to a buyer as saving a few bucks but if you are anything like me (I replaced a D40x for a D80 after 5 months), you will long for these features once you get to know the camera and wish you would have purchased the D90 from the start.

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I figured the first attempt that I would make at this would be to shoot indoors with a fairly low amount of natural light.  Being home alone with Bailey I figured he would be a great subject for the tests.  Judging by the fact that he turned his back on me after the first flash, I got the impression that he wasn’t as into it as I was.

I took a series of shots with my camera in Aperture Priority and in Shutter Priority but since there was such a small amount of natural light in the room, I had to go to shutter speeds less than 1/10 in order for the aperture to move from f/2.8 so I stuck with Aperture Priority as my shooting mode.

Below are the series of shots that I captured labeled with the exposure information listed on each.  Some things to know about these shots:

• The maximum shutter speed that I could in this mode was 1/60 because that is the limit of my D90
• These are the RAW files right out of the camera and they have not been edited. Just re-sized.
• Nikon SB-600 was aimed to the ceiling
• Nikon SB-600 was fitted with a Stofen Diffuser

You can easily see the effect of opening the aperture here while leaving everything else alone.  Personally, I like the shots at f/5.6 and f/9 the best.  In this type of setting, I will stay within that range of apertures in the future.

What do you think?

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A couple of days ago I popped into the Santa Ana location of Samy’s Camera and found out that not only did they have the Nikon D90 at a very attractive price, they were also offering them without sales tax.

I scurried back to a computer and once I saw what used D80′s were going for on eBay, I called the store and told them to hold one because I was on my way over.

Why did I make the jump to the D90 over something like the D300 or the D700 besides the obvious price difference?  I wanted a body with a little boost in MP but mostly, I wanted a camera that worked better in low light and higher ISO.  To be honest, I was only really considering the D300 as a potential upgrade and after reading all the reviews about how the D90 has the same guts as the D300 without the heavy duty case.  With the sensor of the D300 so apealing and the lack of need to hammer nails with my camera, my mind was made up.

It has barely been out of the box for couple of days now and I haven’t had much of a chance to play with it yet but I will say that the hang-held images that I took in the house at ISO’s of 1250 and 1600 look amazing.

I am thrilled with this purchase and I will be posting more of a review on it with some photographs soon.

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After dinner tonight, I went a little nuts shooting a series of photographs and adjusting the Color Mode and the Saturation settings within the camera to produce a variety of effects.  While the Tone and Hue were left alone, I did bump the Sharpness to +1 because who doesn’t like a little extra sharpness in their shots?

I posted a gallery on my Flickr account (click on the photo to open it) rather than post all the images right in this post. I did this so that you can see the titles of the photographs which also happen to be the Color Mode (Ia vs. IIIa) and the Saturation setting (+,-, or 0).

Take a look and see what you think looks best (your feedback is always welcome). For indoor shots like this, I think I have decided what I am going to use but I am not going to give that away until I hear from a few of you.  Let me know what you think!

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