My First Nikon DIGITAL SLR

My Nikon D90 body arrived today, along with the AF-S DX NIKKOR 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR lens and some other goodies. But I’ll talk about those later. The first thing I do is top off the battery, and read the quickstart guide. While I’m waiting for the battery to charge, I mount the lens to the N80 body, just for the fun of it. Of course, it works flawlessly, and at 16mm, it’s rediculously wide.


Yes, there is vignetting; I knew there would be. But there’s two things I can do about it. First, I can use it to shoot a square format; a square crop will eliminate the vignetting. Second, I can borrow a trick from Nikon’s full-frame DSLR’s: FX Crop Mode. I can easily build a Photoshop action to apply FX Crop Mode to 35mm film scans. Third, with a 16mm angle of view, I could create a panoramic crop mode which will also eliminate the vignetting and restore some of the advantage gained by that wonderfully wide angle of view. Best of all, I can apply any of these formats to the same image. I am now even happier with my N80 purchase. I tell you, all this digital photography does wonders for the film world.

Two hours later, I have my first experience shooting with a digital SLR. Broadly speaking, I am underwhelmed, and I mean that in a good way. It’s exactly the same as any other SLR I’ve used, except smoother and quieter. The autofocus works nicely, but then I’m used to that from my Nikon P5100. However, there is no more myopic process of standing back from the camera to look at an LCD, the P5100’s primary means of composing an image. Even though the P5100 has an optical viewfinder as well, it’s hard not to take advantage of all the shooting information that appears in the LCD.

But then, I take it off auto mode and start customizing it to do what I want. Program, aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual modes; white balance, ISO, exposure compensation, bracketing. Like the P5100, the menus are wonderful, but, I don’t really need to use them. For 95% of what I need, I can simply press a dedicated button, rotate a command dial, and view the results on the LCD screen on the top of the camera. I begin to appreciate not just the software user interface, but the physical interface as well. The setup of the controls is logical and ergonomic. Now I’m overwhelmed.

I am now not only a Nikonian, I’m a D90 groupie.