Thursday, February 19, 2009

I, for one, choose to stimulate the hell out of the economy

The UPS packages have stopped coming. For now at least. And as I sit here with a whole plethora of new material belongings I hear my dad’s voice cautioning me to save my money.  I never was very good at listening to common sense.

 

So I took a big chunk of my tax refund and spent it needlessly during these hard economic times. And I’m about as giddy as a schoolgirl about it. :)

 

So what the heck was in the multitude of boxes that arrived with my name on them?

Camera gear!! Oh yeah. I did.

 

A new Nikon D90 to be more specific. With some goodies. Okay, maybe I should say lots of goodies. So of course the first thing I had to do tonight was go out and start snapping away. And boy am I impressed.


I’m loving the depth of field on the 50mm 1.8 lens, and the D90’s ISO performance is AMAZING compared to the G9!!

 

Take this photo for instance. It’s noisy, sure. But this is at ISO 6400!!! The G9 would look like this at ISO400! Talk about a difference:

 

Of course there were shots of DaNece, since she makes such a lovely subject:

 

While we were out we even ran into Rich as he left the office:

We sat and chatted for a bit before deciding to head on home.

 

And once there I was able to make the dogs my guinea pigs of photography. With my new flash to boot. Lola looks a bit dazed:

 

Scrappy just looks like he wants the ball (as usual):

 

Of course, no new camera would be complete without flashing me a few times, so I handed the rig over to D and had her fire off a few rounds in my direction:

 

All in all I am just tickled pink at the new purchase, and I’m sure I will be submitting all of you readers to more learning-curve photos for the next few days.

 

All D90 photos from the day (all shot with the 50mm f/1.8 so far).

13 comments:

Daly said...

you shaved! :)

The D90!! That's awesome and congrats! I saw that one and the video feature and faster frame per second appealed to me but the price tag did not for this SLR amateur. Perhaps when I grow of out my point-and-shoot skills.

TomboCheck said...

Daly - Yep the cheeks were just a bit too much for me. The goatee will be hanging around until it warms up here. :)

And thanks! The real reason why I decided on the D90 was the high-ISO performance. The new chip really lets you crank up the ISO without having to worry about noise, and since I rarely shoot with a flash that was a big priority to me.

Since the tax man was giving me a big check, I decided to splurge and get D90. I just consider myself lucky that I didn't splurge more. There was a D300 calling my name... :)

quilteddogs said...

Congratulations. I wonder what the transition will be like from Canon user to Nikon user. Probably not much difference.

Anonymous said...

Welcome into the Nikon club! I have a D80 which I am very happy with, I'm sure you'll like your D90. I too would like a D700 - a mere $3K is keeping it from being mine. So I will stick with the D80 for a few years.

TomboCheck said...

QuiltedDogs - So far the transition is pretty seamless, except that I have lots of extra buttons on the Nikon.

The only real oddball thing is that all the exposure meters and dials are backwards compared to the canon. Thankfully though Nikon thought to give users an option to reverse them all, which made my life much easier.

Anonymous said...

I am SO jealous. I was thinking of doing the same thing with my tax return - update my photo eqp. And since I have Nikon lenses from my old N8008, I'm hoping (and expecting) they would work on the new-fangled Digicams(?).

TomboCheck said...

Rob - if they are F mount lenses they should work just fine on a D series SLR.

So far I am having a blast with the D90. Well worth the money in my eyes.

Catalyst said...

Suggested caption for that last photo: "O.K. DaNeece, that's enough. Give it to me. Be careful! Don't drop it!!!"

(Congrats on your new gear, Tombo.)

TomboCheck said...

Catalyst - Nah, DaNece is way more careful with electronics than I am.

I'm a bit of a hypocrite in that respect. I'm always telling her to watch our for her gear, and then I abuse the hell out of mine.

Chickenbells said...

Congrats!! I thought at first you bought a BMW...I was all...UPS delivers those?!?! Then I thought you bough a Rich...and I was feeling a little bad because I thought I had the only one of those...tee-hee! The pictures looks just amazing...

I always end up turning around and giving my refund BACK to the IRS because I owe them again for quarterly taxes...I want some new toys!

Harumph...

Melissa said...

Congratulations on all your new toys! The pictures look good, plain and simple. I have such a hard time learning how to truly take advantage of a camera's full features, I'm in awe of what you can do.

And Lola, awww. She's purty.

TomboCheck said...

Melissa - Thanks!
I still have a ton to learn about this new beast. As with most electronics, it will probably do more than I will ever ask of it. But if I read the manual just a few more times I will at least have an idea what it is capable of. :)

As for getting good results - you are too kind. I just take a LOT of exposures, and some of them turn out.

Lola is my new background.

TomboCheck said...

Sadira - I wish I bought a BMW.. sadly not. And I don't think I could handle having a Rich of my own, so I leave that in your capable hands. :)

I ended up owing on taxes for a long time. I got fed up with it and just set my taxes to like 25%. At least now I don't have to scramble for a few hundred every tax-season.