We're a week back from our east coast vacation and fully "recovered." The day before we left I surprised my wife with a gift - a Nikon D60 with two lenses - the 18-55 that comes with plus a 55-200mm. Actually it all came in a good bundle at Costco, including a decent bag.
I know that there is a Nikon lens that goes from 18-200mm, which sounds awfully convenient, but it costs about $600.
The D60 was recommended by two folks at work and it's the first time we've had a digital SLR in the house. As loyal readers may note, we've been avid digital photographers with a series of Nikons, but i thought it was time to step it up a notch and enable my wife to match her photo framing skills with some serious hardware.
The D60 is serious hardware. It's only 17.5 ounces but packs vibration reduction, a 2.5" back panel, 10 mega-pixels, an 8 group/11 element lens system, three frames captured per second and ISO support down to ISO 100. It also does smart things like turn off the display when you put the viewfinder to your eye.
It comes with a decent manual but I really liked the two DVDs that came with it that included good instructional videos. It would have been cool to have those on an included 2Gb SD card. The "AUO" setting works well but you can just rotate the knob to turn off the flash, hit a few pre-programmed "scene scenarios," run through some pre-programmed aperture modes or or go straight into manual mode.
The battery life is very solid and we went days taking photos without recharging. We ended up with about 1000 photos after about two and a half weeks. The pictures were fantastic (check out the D60 club at Flickr). As with any camera you have to work with it to learn how to get the most out of it, but whether it was whale-watching off of Provincetown, boogie-boarding at Nauset Beach or just roasting marshmallows over the fire pit, the D60 was a great addition to the vacation.
Check out the new photo show "ShutterSpeed" on Channel 10.
You should get yourself a really fast lens, like a 50mm f1.4. Thats what I use on a regular basis for taking pics of my kid.. and its a fantastic setup. The fast (f1.4!) lens means you can shoot in very low light without a flash. In addition, the wide open aperture means you get a really great depth of field, which makes kids look gorgeous.
Canon sells an $80 version of this lens thats nearly as good, and is f1.8. I suppose Nikon has something similar, but I haven't ever looked...
Posted by: slacy | August 29, 2008 at 09:30 PM