[dave]

word muthafukkaz

hit myself off with one o deez bad boys last week and ting:



first impressions - its dropping the bomb shit like enola gay. its ill like the bubonic plague. its blinging like Jimmy Savile on a tagteam trolleydash with Mr T round a H.Samuel factory outlet.

hopefully it gets even better when i get me head round all the bells and whistles.

anyroad, is there any good photo book what i aughtta read and shit? like ansel-A's Da Camera or any shit like that, onetime? word.

[SA Chris]

Looks like the money to me!

I'm sure hedgecoe and co have produced a bumper book of digital photography, but they sometimes tend to be a bit basic. Have you ploughed through the manual fully? Mine is fully of useful stuff, otherwise just using the old SLR knowledge. I have been playing with my new toy and definitely need a wider angle lens.

[dave]

Have you ploughed through the manual fully?

sadly being a non-francophone the 'ohh hee-hohh hee-hohh' manual that came with my camera is not so useful to me, have not yet printed out the english one yet.

dis is me first SLR anall, so also some learning to do there and ting.

[Bonjoy]

It's massive! Do you carry it on your head like an African lady with a pot full of water?

[dave]

its not that big really lovejoy, its just very close to you.

[AndyR]

its not that big really lovejoy, its just very close to you.

He may have been looking at his screen through a pair of binoculars.

[Johnny Brown]

dave, you know there's a firmware upgrade already available? - gives you most of the changes that the D70s brought in.

[dave]

JB i had the firmware updated within 20mins of getting it out of the box.

[Falling Down]

dave, you know there's a firmware upgrade already available? - gives you most of the changes that the D70s brought in.

Ooh I didn't know that.... I have one of these bad boys too and like Dave said  (in so many different ways) they are really rather good.

[Johnny Brown]

JB i had the firmware updated within 20mins of getting it out of the box

No flies on Dave... though you missed the chance to get used to it as it was, and then get that new camera feeling all over again. Guess FD should be enjoying that one...

[dave]

the main change in the firmware is it make the menus look blinginger. the other stuff is stuff you're not basically going to able to notice visibly but is obviously better to have them, like some changes to the way it focuses better or summert. Obviously it don't make the screen 0.2" larger as per the D70s, but you can get round that by moving your head a fraction closer to the camera - hey presto bigger screen.

[Johnny Brown]

judging by that photo you are overdoing that a bit.

[Jim]

word up,
got me a d50 with the 18-55 lens for about 360 notes in singapore. new to slr type thingy but its a good camera so far.
Any useful tips or owt any one can offer me?
also any hints about format (ie started shooting in jpeg but moved onto raw NEF and photoshop won't touch them and I generally shy away from installing software that comes with stuff, in this case its nikon pictureproject 1.5)
cheers ya'll

[Bubba]

What version of PS are you running? New versions should be happy with RAW.

[Johnny Brown]

Photoshop cs comes with adobe bridge - open ps first then use this for browsing, then double click and you get a pre-process window that then allows you to open the images and save them as you wish.

[Jim]

What version of PS are you running? New versions should be happy with RAW.

come on now Bub's.... CS2 of course

turned out that I had to update the camera raw plugin to 3.2, twas only v3 that was on there which didn't support it
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3067
for those that want the download page (free)

[SA Chris]

Any useful tips or owt any one can offer me?

If you are new to SLRs, learn how apertures and shutter sppeds work, as well as metering and focussing modes. Learning to bracket and under/overexpose is useful too.

And take loads of photos. Loads.

[Jim]

I intend to learn all about that shit, hopefully get some tips from johnny at the crag.
was meaning more about the D50 itself
is it best to shoot in raw mode due to better quality and editing or shoot in Jpeg for ease of viewing and processing, any views?

[SA Chris]

Depends how many pics you intend taking, and how good your software (got Photoshop?) and Hardware (got loads of memory?) is for processing the pics. Also how much memory you have available on the camera. If you are just shooting days out and weekends, I would go for RAW. If you are going away on holiday, I would go for JPEG.

[Bubba]

come on now Bub's.... CS2 of course

Do you find it runs like a dog? My copy of CS2 is slow as fook - apparantly there's some registry tweaks that help.

On my 10D, you can only use raw in the non-auto modes, so it's jpeg for auto, and raw for "proper" photography. Going to try and use raw as much as possible now though.

[Bonjoy]

Do you find it runs like a dog?

Could be worse...

[Jim]

got a 1 gig card so get 136 piccies when shooting raw and 285 when shooting in max jpeg. just noticed it'll shoot raw and do a large basic jpeg at the same time and still give 120 piccies, might be usefull for quick viewing.
Only really use photoshop for resizing and cropping mainly so don't notice its slow but it is slow to start up but so was cs and 7. try d/ling a later version maybe

[dave]

is it best to shoot in raw mode due to better quality and editing or shoot in Jpeg for ease of viewing and processing, any views?

so far i'm only shooting jpegs.

[Jim]

Once you've processed the raw image, what do you recon is the best format to save them in, for quality and easy of further processing? jpegs, tiff etc..