Get to know Ken Rockwell
Ken Rockwell runs a website that covers the ins and outs of Canon and Nikon DSLR products. Bodies, lenses, flashes, and other accessories are all covered here in great deal. This being his site he is very clear that the opinions on what he posts are his based on his experience and use of the products that he is describing. These opinions are respected by the majority of the photographers that I have spoken with partly at least because the revenue that the site brings in comes from donations and the referrals/advertisements of the companies from whom he buys his equipment and not from Canon and Nikon.
As a novice to the world of DSLR I frequently pester people about what equipment that I should get. I mentioned earlier that a conversation with my former graduate adviser lead me to choosing Nikon as my brand of choice. What I did not do (and what I am hoping that this blog can help you do) is to do proper research on what body or kit that I should have purchased right off the bat.
In a previous entry I mentioned that I started out with the D40x and upgraded quickly to the D80. What I did not say was that I was too over excited to be purchasing a DSLR that I did not properly research or even hold the two of them at the time of the D40x purchase.
What I am getting to here in all of this is a website that I have been spending more and more time on has the months have passed and I am learning more about what I have, what I can do, and what I want to do.
What I am getting into more lately are his description and reviews of the Nikon lenses. The site has been instrumental in teaching me about what I have and what it can do as well as what I want to do and what I need in order to do it. The descriptions are very well detailed and easy to understand for a novice like myself to comprehend.
No matter if you are considering a switch to DSLR or you are looking to upgrade for equipment, this site has the information that you want in easy to understand format. While the navigation of the site could be cleaned up a bit, you can get to learn your way around quite easily after a while.
Let’s Back Up a Step … Recommended Reading
I should mention how I even started learning what I was doing in the first place. After a trip to San Francisco with my amazing wife, she remarked at the quality of the composition of a lot of the photos that I had taken while we were out playing tourist. At this point, I had a small Sony point and shoot camera that I always took with me on trips or events. It was her positive feedback that gave me the inspiration and courage to make the jump to DSLR. While extremely excited, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Originally I had purchased the Nikon D40x. I was completely new to this and I really hadn’t done any research. My adviser from graduate school recommended to me that I wanted to go with Nikon (as that is what he shoots). He also said that the D40x was a good place to start in DSLR. Once I got the camera I made it a point to dig through the manual as much as possible to see what I really had here (as I still do today). I knew that the Auto mode was there is I wanted it but I really wanted to learn how to take photographs instead of snapping pictures.
A book that was recommended to me was Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson . Here I learned about ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speeds as well as Depth of Field. I had heard all of these terms before in a B&W class that I took my senior year at college but they never really sank in. There are a few chances in reading the book to take our your camera and try out what Peterson is explaining. I highly recommend doing this.
After shooting hundreds of shots with the D40x, I popped into Ritz Camera (where I bought my D40x) and was looking at lenses. Long story short, once I held the D80 and found out that Ritz (with their wonderful return policy) would take back my camera and lenses plus the difference in price in exchange for the D80, I hurried home to collect all of the packaging and manuals that I had luckily saved.
With the D80 I started to shoot in RAW and I have been very pleased with the results. I have never used the Nikon software for working with the RAW files so I cannot comment on how well it works. What I did start to use was Photoshop CS3. I was using iPhoto up to this but I really hadn’t spent too much time learning the ins and outs of the program. The book that I bought to coach me through the particulars of Photoshop was The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter) by Scott Kelby .
These two books really got me to understand what I was doing with the camera and how to get them onto the computer so that I could begin to look at them and work with them in Photoshop. I highly recommend them to anyone looking to get a decent foundation of what they are doing when making the jump into the world of DSLR.
