I’ve had my Nikon D60
for 6 months now so I thought it would be a perfect time to look back at what I’ve learned and how I like my first DSLR camera. I’ll make it a little series of posts where this is part 1.
Six months ago I decided it was time for me to go out and buy my first DSLR camera, I’d read reviews and guide for years and now I just had to have one. I quickly decided on Nikon because I liked the way their interface is built. After choosing a brand that I liked I went looking for the model that would be right for me. I narrowed the models down to only consumer and prosumer models because of my level of knowledge and the price. First the Nikon D40
seemed like the perfect for a beginner photographer, but I thought it had some limits. After the Nikon D40 I found the Nikon D5000
which had just come out, the Nikon D5000 have a lot of great features that the D40 and D60 doesn’t have. I thought for a long time about buying the Nikon D5000 because of the swivel screen, HD video, better sensor and some more features, but I ended up buying the D60 because of the price. I saved some money buying the D60 instead of the Nikon D5000, so I got a lot of great stuff beside the camera itself.
So how do I like my Nikon D60, well it’s a great consumer/prosumer Nikon DSLR camera and I like it a lot because of the weight and the easy-to-use interface. The weight is a huge deal for me because I want to be able to take it with me when I’m traveling, there is nothing worse than a huge camera(bag) that you have to lug around all day while sightseeing a completely new city.
Accesories:
With the camera I bought this Lowepro Rezo 160 AW Camera Bag
, it’s a really great bag for the Nikon D60 and you almost can’t feel you are wearing it. There is a big compartment where you can split the space up with 2 dividers and with these I think you could fit 2 lenses + the Nikon D60 in there. Besides the big compartment there is also a lot of small pockets and rooms for batteries, memory cards and stuff like that. The bag also have a rain cover inside it, so in heavy rain or snow you can take it out and cover the bag – works very well.
I also bought this SanDisk 4 GB Extreme III SDHC
memory card and I really can’t praise this memory card enough. It is so fast and reliable and it’s one of the best SD cards I’ve ever owned, I actually bought another one as a backup. It’s very important that your memory card isn’t the bottleneck of your brand new camera because you’ll get annoyed with that very quickly.
I’d read several places that it was a good idea to buy a spare/backup battery for a DSLR camera. So I thought well “I better get one then..” so I bought a spare Nikon EN-EL9a Battery
, you have noticed that this is an EN-EL9a and not the standard EN-EL9 that the D60 ships with and the reason for this is that the EN-EL9a have more mAh(capacity).
After the first 2 months with this camera I was ready to try some new forms of photography and I wanted a tri-pod, but not some heavy tri-pod that is hard to lug around and position. After reading through all sorts of photography blogs I finally found the Joby Gorillapod SLR
and it looked amazing. After I got this I’ve been taking all sorts of crazy angled and positioned photographies, you can position the flexible legs anywhere you’d want to – on a branch, bench, fence, road, couch, chair, light pole, etc. This is such a great invention and I think every photographer should have one of these. Now I’m just looking for a good brand of tri-pods because I really want a “real” tri-pod too. I wouldn’t recommend the GorillaPod for too many slow shutter photos because it might move a little bit if not secured properly.
This Christmas I’d put so many photography related things on my wish-list and I got one thing that is so great I just have to tell you guys about it. It’s the Nikon 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX Lens
and WOW! This lens is built for Nikon’s DSLR cameras with a DX sensor. Even though f/1.8G isn’t really that impressive, I was still surprised by the creamy bokeh and great night photos this lens takes. Here is a shot i took with the lens a few days ago:
Edit:
I forgot to mention some of the accesories that I’m thinking of buying, so I just wanted to add those here in the bottom.
I really want to buy a remote/cable-release for those long shutter photos, and just to eliminate shakiness. I’ve been looking at the simple but very cheap Nikon ML-L3 Wireless Remote
– only thing is that it seems to be missing a couple of features that I really would like to use. So if any of you have a suggestion for a great remote/cable-release for a Nikon D60, please write a comment below.
Another thing that people keep telling me I need to buy is different filters, so I’ve read up on a lot of them. Most people use a UV Filter 52mm
but mostly just for protecting the lens glass from scratches and dust, I don’t really think I need one of these even though they are fairly cheap. There is a couple of filters that I would like to try out, B + W 52mm Circular Polarizer MC
and a Hoya 52mm 8X (0.9) ND MC Filter
. These filters seems to be able to give me some great effects and make some photos better looking. One of the more experimental filters I would like to buy is a Close-Up Macro Filter 52mm
just because it would be fun to play around with. If you have any recommendations on brands or types of filters, please let me know in the comment section below.
This is it for part 1 of my little series of posts about the Nikon D60.
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