I purchased the Nikon 3200 package that included bag, 16gm card, camera, wireless link, and 55 & 200 VR lenses for 599 from Samsclub online.


I gave it to my wife for Xmas and she loves it. It is an extremely smooth camera. It opened my eyes to the shit we have been using for all these years.

I don't shoot Nikon, and I'm not sure it's true "these days", but back in the day (70s for sure), Nikon sure did have a great grind on the primes. Even back then I shot Canon for 35mm (A-1) and Bronica for 2-1/4 (EC-TL II). Oh, and some pretty sweet plate film on a submarine periscope with a pretty nice grind too!!! :D

I think you made an awesome choice. The biggest deal is to get a camera "in the hands" and let the shutter do its thing.

As a man who shot film for oh-so-many years, and STILL love the challenge of it, I also LOVE what digital has done to help bring out the artist in so many more people.

Some of the best shots my camera has taken over the years was when I handed the camera over to another parent at a sporting event (very hard to shoot and coach!), or even to kids. Give a nine-year-old a 20D with a grip loaded-up with a 70-200/2.8 and 2 minutes of how to hold/use it, and what they shoot is often time amazing. After they get passed the "what if I drop it" scare, it's awesome. And in the hands of parents does produce fewer blurry shots (from a percentage perspective), but a lot fewer pictures too. I give the camera to a group of cub scouts with a macro lens, and the stuff they shoot is just awesome.

I'll say this, one of the pictures that hangs on my office wall is one my seven-year-old took of a mushroom growing out of a downed tree at Blue-and-Gray park east of Lee's Summit. Perhaps a little homerism there, but it was taken by a kid who was seven... And I wasn't even near him when he took it. He asked for the camera, the older scouts took them out on a short "hike", and that's what he took. Awesome!

Either way, buy a bigger hard drive and let the pics flow.. :)

What the hell does this even mean?

Lenses are "ground" into shape, so at the consumer/prosumer and mass-production levels, Nikon was (generally speaking) considered to have a better grind than the others at the time. It's a fun argument to listen too, but they were awesome. I find that finding sites with MTF (modulation transfer function) charts are far better. Here... http://www.photoreview.com.au/tips/u...ing-mtf-graphs

And "primes" are lenses with fixed focal lengths. No zoom.... And the "zoom" function of a lens, while nice, tends to take away some of the perfection of the lens. Back in the day it was very normal to buy a 35mm camera with the standard 50mm lens. Nowadays, it's almost unheard of.

Take a trip through Luminous Landscape (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/index.shtml) and/or Fred Miranda's site (http://www.fredmiranda.com) and there are a ton of interesting articles.

And if you spend a lot of time on boring conference calls, here's a site that can be very interesting to browse. Some of the work is so far out there that it's stupid, but a lot of it is pretty amazing too.. (http://photo.net/)

thanks, I assumed it had something to do with lenses.

I have an old Minolta with a 50mm lens. Haven't used it in years.

You should break it out and use it...

Its sad the weather has been so brutal I've let my 6D and 5D MkIII basically sit unused for the last month or two. Its hard after being in Utah, Arizona, Yellowstone and lots of other western states to get excited to shoot Kansas when it 10 degrees out.

I've been meaning to learn how to do a decent time lapse of the night sky for a few seconds of video. Two nights ago I was really kicking myself for not reading up on it yet as it looked great out there.

Nothing really too it. Get the fastest lens you got (lowest f ratio) set it at the lowest f setting put it on a tripod focus on a distant object and aim it at the sky with a $15 intervalometer and let her rip.

Remember the rule of 500. Take 500 and divide by the aperture of the lens and set that as you maximum exposure. Anything longer will cause the stars to streak. So if a 50mm lens then max exposure is 10 seconds. 500 / 50 = 10.

I've started playing around with it a little. This shot is of a neighbor's Mizzou flag waving in a stiff wind through my window across the cul-de-sac. And that's just point and shoot. I did nothing with the camera settings. I want to catch some geese flying over.

My daughters both have gymnastics meets this weekend, so I've been taking it to their practices to practice with it. I set the camera to continuous shooting (which sounds really cool, btw) and auto everything else. Their facility is about the size of an average high school basketball gym, and I was on the opposite side from where they were practicing. My main problem so far is keeping my daughter as the focal point...but I'm assuming that comes with practice. Most of the shots were decent, more than a few of them bad/out of focus, but there were a few really cool shots. I got her on the uneven bars in flight between the two bars...perfectly in focus, exactly midway between the bars. Just a cool shot.

I do have a question though. This lens has image stabilization. Should that be on or off with shooting fast action in continuous mode? Or does it matter. I would think it might slow down some of the shots, but I'm really not sure. I have a monopod that I use that provides some stabilization.

OK...more questions about indoor sports photography. I tried some more manual settings this weekend and didn't get great results. In most of the photos, the subject's center mass was in focus nicely, but the arms/legs were blurry. I was told by a photog that was there that I need to up my ISO to freeze the motion better. I've been reading through the 20D manual...are shutter speed and ISO the same thing? It says that ISO is the sensitivity to light, whereas shutter speed is how fast the shutter opens/closes. In some places though, it seems they're used interchangeably. So, based on the manual and reading some forum posts, here are some settings that I'm going to try next. Any thoughts/suggestions?:

--AF Mode--
AI Servo with automatic AF point selection

--Program Mode--
1. Tv mode (shutter priority)
-set ISO speed to 800 or 1600 and allow the camera to auto-set the aperture
-if the aperture gets set too narrow (probably 3.5 or narrower), try option 2

2. Manual exposure mode
-set ISO speed to 800 or 1600
-set aperture width to 2.8
-make adjustments based on the exposure level meter

3. Tv mode with exposure compensation
-set ISO speed to 800 or 1600 and allow the camera to auto-set the aperture
-raise or lower the exposure compensation based on the exposure level meter
-this option is not available in manual exposure mode

--White Balance--
Most gyms will use either white fluorescent or tungsten lighting.

I find the easy way is to set what you know, and let it go. Try this:

1) Set the ISO to 1600 (or H if you're willing to try) so the camera can fire as quickly as possible.
2) Set the camera to AV mode and manually set it to 2.8 (or the brightest setting you have, which should be 2.8), and that should help with getting the shutter speed as fast as the camera can go.

While that will minimize the DoF (the 2.8 part), the ISO of 1600/H will do about all you can do to limit the fast-moving-parts from blurring (if that's what you want).

But I'd recommend the AV because it lets you control the 2.8 part of the lens you just spend so much money on (for its 2.8 ability), but keeps the camera's brains in the mix beyond that.

I didn't know I could manually set the ISO when in AV mode. I had it in AV mode for a while, with the aperture set to 2.8, and the camera kept setting the ISO (or maybe shutter speed) to 60 or 80. I knew that was way too slow to stop any motion, so I stopped using that mode. I'll try out your suggestions.

In AV mode, with you having set/forced the aperture to 2.8, the camera sets the shutter speed to whatever it needs to based on the other thing you had "set" (the ISO). So set the aperture to 2.8 (fast/bright as we say), the ISO to 1600/H (fast), and the camera will/should set the shutter speed to something a lot faster than a 60th or 80th of a second. Then again, I'm not sure how dark the gym was. If you PM me one of the original pics (with EXIF data still attached), I'll take a look...