lester_hawksby1

<p>There is, unfortunately, a very good reason to have 12mp - which is that many buyers of photography for commercial publication won't take images with fewer mp these days. Their reasons are not always* very good (the linear resolution difference is very slight) but there you go. If your customers are like this, you may not have much choice in the matter. Of course, in a year's time they'll probably all decide they want 24mp...<br>

*(not always, only sometimes - if you understand why you need 12mp in your application, I don't mean you)</p>

AF isn't really all that important for very close up work; even cameras with excellent AF systems don't always do it satisfactorily. Not having metering, though, is difficult for most people.

 

The Nikon 60mm AF-S macro is nice but perhaps overkill. It's an excellent lens, but only slightly better than many other options and a lot more expensive. To my mind it represents so-so value for money.

 

The Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro is optically as good but not quite as well built as the Nikon 60. Unlike some cheap 3rd party lenses, the build quality is not at all bad; it is much better than the cheaper Nikon zooms! It will not autofocus on the d40, but is easy to manual focus (I used mine on the d40 a lot when I first got it - now it usually lives on another camera). It will meter fine, and the camera's modes work as normal, so it's still fairly easy to use. To my mind it represents good value for money.

 

The old Nikon 55mm AI macro is also optically excellent and superbly well made, but will neither autofocus nor meter on the d40; every automatic mode of the camera is disabled when it's mounted, and you get no feedback or exposure information at all. It is good value for money only to users who are happy to shoot and check the histogram and adjust and reshoot, every single time. This is easy when you're used to it but hard to adjust to; I'm happy to work this way, for some subjects, but many people find it offputting. If you're not sure your daughter is happy with this, it's probably not a good buy. If you are, it's good value for money.

I think the S5 is actually cheaper in some countries! It seems about £100 less here in the UK where the d90 is still quite pricey.

 

It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. The S5 is a really good camera but some aspects (screen, menus) do feel a little dated compared to the polish of new cameras. The d90 is the latest thing but more tightly cost controlled. Both have good image quality, but in totally different ways. They're capable of recording about the same level of detail, it's just easier to do it with the d90. On the other hand, the s5 has an amazing dynamic range, subtle tonality and pleasing colour which beats any other DX-sensor camera hands down. Clipped highlights never happen to me any more. The S5 can take a little longer to clear the buffer if you take a lot of shots in quick succession, but this does not equal responsiveness problems unless you're a sports pro (it's fine for, say, birding). For my money, the S5 is a much better buy unless small and light is a priority for you (that d200 body is pretty solid). Also, although the S5's dedicated raw software is too expensive and not very nice to use, there is a brilliant free raw program for it called s7raw which really gets the most out of it - so, again, slightly better value.

 

(A note on detail: The S5 really does have twelve million separate pixels, it's not an interpolated resolution. The thing about them both being under the same microlens is one of those silly recurring Internet myths. The original Fuji SR sensors had joined pixels but the SR II - and the SR Pro used in the S5 - squeeze totally separate highlight pixels into the gaps between the shadow pixels. There's even a diagram on the Fuji site

 

http://www.fujifilm.co.uk/consumer/digital/digital-cameras/d-slr-long-zoom/finepix-s5-pro/Features

 

However, your subject has to be mid-toned, your lens good, and your exposure very accurate to actually record a 12mp image. Any area of the image which is bright enough to cause highlight clipping in the S pixels or dark enough to cause shadow clipping in the R pixels isn't as detailed. This is oddly like using film! Also, the S5 has a rather strong anti-aliasing filter, which does it a slight disservice as you need very slightly more sharpening than in some cameras, and defaults to slightly too much noise reduction - it gets much sharper if you turn the NR down, and is still as good as the 90 at high ISO even if you do. All together, it fails badly at shooting USAF charts but the prints from real subjects are great.)

Surely when you're in A, S, or P the meter is instead used to show the amount of exposure compensation? It does that on my d40 and Fuji S5 and seems very logical to me... did you give exposure comp a try?

I love to hike and agree entirely about not always wanting to carry the bulk of a serious SLR and heavy lens. Not liking compacts, I have settled on a D40 with Nikon 45mm f/2.8 AI-P pancake lens as a hiking camera. The body is somewhat smaller than the pro models, but the lens is tiny compared with almost any other Nikon. The resulting combination is about the size of a 35mm film compact and only slightly larger than a large compact digital. It fits in my overcoat pocket. Even the superbly-designed lens hood only adds a few mm to the total length; without the hood, the lens barely protrudes forward of the grip.

 

Image quality is excellent. The lens is sharp and clear and doesn't seem to distort. It vignettes a little at 2.8; otherwise there are no defects to speak of. Bokeh is pleasant; although not the best ever, it's better than any compact. Low light ability is fine. The body may not be a solid metal d300 but it's a lot tougher than most compacts; the lens is extremely well made and robust, with very smooth and precise focusing action. This makes it nice to use, which I think is a major factor in making me glad I brought the camera along! The controls are much easier than a compact and the battery life is enormous. I have a viewfinder magnifier fitted, a DK-17m on a little adaptor, which gives a big clear life-size view; it's not necessary, but definitely recommended.

I'm a big fan of the 45mm f/2.8 AI-P pancake Nikkor. It makes the camera much more portable than a big zoom, is well made with smooth manual focusing, and has very pleasant optical qualities. It's no substitute for the latest zooms with all the technological features (AF-S and VR are definitely good things!), but a good complement for them. It's a little long on the cropped sensor (like a 67mm on film), but I find it wide enough to be useful, and you can always do stitched panoramas when you want to get more in.

 

If you want an equivalent to a fast 50mm, Sigma's 30mm f/1.4 is a good fast normal for low light and has good AF too. Nikon's 16-85 appears to be good stuff as far as general purpose zooms go. Others have already mentioned the wide-angle zooms which will be the only way you'll get really wide on an APS-C dSLR - but you only need one to cover all the wide angle lengths.

The infinity focus issue is probably not a problem. The lack of electrics on a mount adaptor, or electric connection between adaptor and camera body, would be serious. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that Canon lenses only stop down electronically; a 5x macro lens with no opportunity to stop down would be of limited use!

 

I wonder if a reversed prime setup would achieve the magnifications Marko wants. Marko, could you give us any clues about your aims here and what macro equipment you're used to working with?

I don't believe so. Canon's lens mount is very different from Nikon's, and this lens is not as mechanically simple as a basic prime, so it would be difficult. Nikon's approach to extreme macro seems to have generally involved bellows instead.

My goodness. They say 2,000 frames from a Nikon D2x. That must have taken a lot of patience, unless they have a prototype SLR-sized version of the Gigapan device.

With manual focus, no flash and no LCD image review you can make those batteries last even longer. It's getting ridiculous - I know what Nicholas means about losing the charger between uses! I get up to about 1200 on the D40, despite its smaller battery and obligatory LCD use, maybe 900 including zero-degrees-ish freezing days and big lenses with hungry focus motors. The Fuji S5, effectively a slightly older generation, eats battery much faster. At this rate, by the *next* generation of camera, the battery will probably outlive the photographer!

I can't help but notice that those pictures suffer a lot of JPEG compression artefacts - the result of trying to

squeeze them into too small a data file, which causes loss of detail. It might be just your image hosting service

(in which case it's going to be really difficult to judge what's happening in the camera). On the other hand, it

might actually be the camera's compression setting (which could actually be the root of the problem). If I set my

d40 to "JPEG Basic" quality it looks rather similar to this. Therefore, checking the "image quality" setting on

the second (camera) menu might be a good place to start. Try setting it on "JPEG Fine" if it isn't already.

 

If this isn't the cause, it would help if you could post a link to a file straight from the camera - not resized

or edited - which will be much easier to examine. (It should contain something called EXIF data which provides

information on how the camera was set).

 

Hope that helps.

That's a T-mount adaptor, I'm sure of it. It is far too thick to be Pentax Screw to Pentax K. In fact, it looks *exactly* like my T-mount adaptor (except it says Pentax).

 

So, looks like you're in luck - no expensive glass adaptors or custom machining needed.

 

Strange about the screw threads, but then it can be hard to tell. At this point, the chances of it *not* being T-mount seem extremely low to me.

 

Let us know how you get on!

The measurement is very helpful, thanks. There are only two commonly found 42mm screw threads in this sort of

photographic equipment - 42x1mm (Pentax screw mount) and 42x0.75mm (T-mount). Unfortunately, both can be adapted

to Pentax bayonet, whereas only the T-mount can be adapted to Nikon bayonet - so this is not in itself absolutely

conclusive. If the adaptor is very thin, though, it is likely to be Pentax-screw-to-bayonet; if it is relatively

thick it is probably T-mount. (The T mount is not only a different thread, but it is designed to hold the lens a

different distance from the film - my T adaptor has a little over 8mm between the Nikon and screw faces)

 

So if the adaptor part is skinny like this

http://www.rugift.com/photocameras/pentax-adapter.htm

(it will have a 1mm thread)

then it's a Pentax screw to Pentax bayonet adaptor and I'm afraid you're out of luck, whereas

 

If the adaptor part is bulky like this

http://www.warehouseexpress.com/product/default.aspx?sku=1002292

(it will have a finer, 0.75mm thread)

then it's a T-mount to Pentax bayonet adaptor and you can easily buy a T-mount to Nikon bayonet adaptor to

replace it.

 

(I hasten to add I am making no recommendation of either seller or part, and in fact the second one seems rather

overpriced to me)

 

It should be possible to measure the screw thread with a ruler to discern between the two. I just tried that on

my T-mount lens and on a 42mm screw and it's pretty easy to tell - look sideways on against the light so the

thread is silhouetted like a range of mountains, then hold a ruler against it - do four peaks and their

associated troughs fill 4mm or 3mm? (I tried to take a photo of this but I haven't enough hands!)

 

(I'm really pretty convinced it's a T-mount, as Quantaray 400mm in T-mount seems relatively well known and well

thought of...)

Hang on a moment guys. If the lens had a built in Pentax mount it would certainly need one of those irritating lensed adaptors which are never quite satisfactory. However, from the sound of the original poster's description, it might well be a lens with a generic kind of screw mount which then has a Pentax converter screwed on it. Quite a lot of old third-party long lenses work this way. If this is true, is almost certainly possible to replace the (glassless) Pentax adaptor with a (glassless) Nikon adaptor and use the lens on a d60 in fully manual mode, still being able to reach infinity focus. A glassless adaptor would, of course, save money and not degrade quality.

 

However, the hard part will be finding exactly what adaptor part is needed. Google suggests the existence of a Quantaray 400mm T-mount but I have no idea if there are other possibilities.

 

I have an old mirror lens which is just like this - an Optomax (never heard of them elsewhere) - the mount is not M42 screw although it looks very much like it - it is 42mm diameter but the pitch is smaller. T-mount. Anyway, the chances are high that this Quantaray works on something very similar. Bert, when you remove the Pentax adaptor, is what's inside a 42mmx0.75mm screw thread? If so, you probably only need a T-mount-to-Nikon adaptor which should cost about $10 or $15.

I have a d40 (amongst others) and know people with D40x models but I've not tried the D60.

 

It seems to me that the improvement of the D40x over the D40 is marginal, if there is an improvement at all. My reckoning would be that it's not worth the extra money. Looking at the spec sheet, the extra features of the D60 over the D40 also seem rather small - yet the price gap between 40 and 60 is rather large.

 

So, if your budget is very limited (and you don't mind manually focusing any prime lenses you might buy later), the D40 is probably better value for money than its slightly bigger brothers. The D80 is probably the next meaningful step up - its improvements are much more concrete (better viewfinder, top lcd, focus motor, and I seem to remember something about flash control too) although high ISO performance is weaker.

 

If you say "move up to digital", do you have any existing Nikon gear?

10mm is indeed very, very wide. I have a very nice 15mm lens for my film system (equivalent angle of view to 10mm on your d40) and it took me months of work and hundreds of carefully-considered shots before I was at all at home with such an extreme view. That was why I originally indicated that I thought an ultrawide might involve a bit of a learning curve. 12mm is somewhat narrower but still really quite a dramatic view - perspective tends to look exaggerated on prints. I don't think you'd be "getting in over your head" with the Nikon any more or less than any other very wide lens, at least in terms of technique. (Here's a little exercise: mark out ninety degrees of your field of view, left to right, right there at your desk. That's about what you'll get in frame with the 12-24 at its widest. Then compare this with the widest you can zoom at the moment - about 66 degrees - it's a big difference! The 10-20, by the way, will get in about 100 degrees - stand in the corner of a square room and both walls are in frame - vertical compositions risk catching your feet.)

 

From the samples I've seen, the Nikon is undoubtedly an excellent piece of kit. On the other hand, it is not massively more future-proof than its competitors. No lens you asked about will work on full frame if you go that way. If you upgrade to a DX body like a d300 most third-party lenses will still work fine, though. (Apparently there was an era when some Sigmas needed an upgrade to work on newer bodies, but I've never had to.) That only leaves the issue of resolution - and while there undoubtedly are some lenses which look OK on lower-density sensors but get shown up as weak on higher-density ones, it's not a huge factor.

 

If you've got the cash, the Nikon is a bit better, but the quality difference might not be enough to justify the price gap. Only you can know whether your psychology can be satisfied by working hard at learning with a "good enough" tool or whether you'll always be wishing you had that "best on market" tool - people in the latter category seem to be rather vocal around here, but sometimes I do wonder where they find the money.

 

If you intend to resell, the Nikon will probably hold its value better. I'm not in the habit of selling on my old gear to fund new acquisitions (see "good enough" above :-) ) so I'm not the right person to ask about this.

 

Hope some of that helps, good luck and have fun.

Glad it was of some use! If what you really want is wide angle - and it can be a pretty awesome tool - that makes it much easier to make meaningful comparisons. Quite a lot has been written here comparing the various superwide zooms...

 

As for macro, ah, I didn't realise that. True macro is indeed another world and a lot to learn - but if you can take it away from work, try that macro lens for portraits too. You should be able to get some really nice results. I bought my macro only for technical work but have ended up using it for all sorts of things!

You seem to be comparing three very different creatures there!

 

The Sigma 30/1.4 is not a wide angle. Setting your kit zoom to 30mm will show you exactly what you'll get with this lens, and it is not wide. However, it does offer very interesting capabilities which nothing else you mention can match. It can isolate the subject by limiting depth of field enormously - giving a sharp target and blurred background - in fact, at f/1.4 the effect is so powerful it needs to be used very carefully. Combine that with the fixed angle of view, which is a totally different experience to framing with a zoom, and there is a bit of a learning curve to get the most out of it. When you do, you'll find it gathers in so much light that you can freeze fast action in dodgy lighting conditions, or get away with not using a tripod in all those places it's not really practical. It's handy in dark museums and churches where flashguns and pods are banned. It will even, just about, let you shoot hand-held at night under street lighting without attracting attention to yourself with flash or tripod. On the other hand, it's not all that great at small-aperture, infinity-focused outdoor landscapes on bright days - it can get by, but is not remarkable there (where most of its power is wasted anyway). It has a very solid build indeed, by the way - it's made like a tank, focuses quickly and quietly. Verdict: Good stuff for streets and portraits and travel, no real improvement for landscape.

 

The Tokina 12-24 is extremely wide indeed. Nothing else you mention can match this for width. On the other hand, it is no better at coping with poor light than the conditions you already have, and is not all that strong at isolating a subject by blurring the background. The extreme end of the width setting is very dramatic and takes quite a bit of getting used to - some people take to ultrawides immediately, some don't - and will tend to include a wide range of lighting situations in one frame (which demands careful exposure settings) so, again, a learning curve. The other posters are right in that this will not focus automatically on your d40, but AF matters less at wider angle settings (where focus is a bit less critical) and the green focus-assist dot will still work, so it might be OK for you. Sigma make a 10-20 which is even wider and WILL autofocus on your d40, but reports of its quality are rather mixed; search the forums for many comments in favour and many against. I can't speak for the build quality of either and am still weighing up Sigma vs. Nikon here myself. Verdict: Good for landscapes if you like to take your time and work carefully. Could be fun for the street and travel. No help at all for portraits (unless you hate flattery) and no improvement in your ability to work with just available light or anywhere a tripod would be a problem.

 

The 18-200 VR mostly doesn't do anything radically different to what you already have - it just zooms in quite a lot further. Of the options outlined, it's probably the easiest to just pick up and use, based on your existing experience. It's also the only one that will actually replace your 18-55mm kit lens - the others will complement it but you'd still need it. VR helps reduce camerashake, but only in a limited range of situations - not when you need to control motion blur too, and when you don't, a tripod is often a better bet - so it won't do all that much for your ability to work in low light. Optical quality is acceptable, but not going to rock your world. All in all, this is the least interesting choice - only a good idea if you always find the 55mm setting on your existing lens isn't getting you close enough. For most street, travel, landscape and portrait work you will find 200mm really rather long, so the one new thing this lens would offer you might not even be all that useful. It's well-made enough, certainly far better than your 18-55, but not spectacular. Verdict: It's OK but only adds a little capability. The 55-200 VR is cheaper and less solid but would add most of the same options and give you more money left over to go to interesting places with. It doesn't seem to me to particularly chime with your choice of subjects or stated goal of exploring more options, but you might disagree.

 

I don't know how long you've got before your vacation, but if you can find the time, have a serious think about which of the above-outlined extra capabilities you really want before splashing out any cash. This is more a matter of individual taste than absolute bests. (Personally, I'd pick up a 50, 55 or 60mm macro before any of the above - you didn't ask about that but have you considered it? Not only will you be able to focus much closer, and have access to a nice f/2.8 for a bit more light-gathering power and background isolation, but all macro lenses - even the cheap Sigma 50 - are massively sharper than anything you mention and the quality will blow you away. They're also superb for portraits and museums, though usually less impressive at infinity focus. Then again, I'm sure someone else will step in to sing the praises of the cheap, sharp, light 50/1.8...)

 

In truth, most lenses of all makers are pretty good out of the box. All manufacturers make the occasional lemon, but reliable data on the proportion of lemons is hard to come by. So, *whichever* lens you buy, try to get it a while before you really need it and give it a thorough test. This should include general use for whatever you intend it for, and some more specific technical testing (focus accuracy, corner sharpness, quality at infinity and up close, quality at different apertures). The latter should all take place on a tripod at low ISO. To check focus accuracy, include something with plenty of fine detail which smoothly recedes away from the camera (a tape-measure could do, but so could a pavement with a few chalk marks), and take care to focus on a specific and identifiable point in it. Shoot at max aperture. Later, examine your shot at 100% - if the point you targeted looks sharper than the parts of the same object that are more or less distant, it's all good. If a point more or less distant is sharper than the bit you meant, you might have a focus problem, ask on here for more detailed instructions.

 

Sorry this answer exploded into such great length... I hope some of it helps.

I've never seriously tested (and don't have access to a 200 now), but I believe AF speed is the same. It's certainly pretty fast.

 

I've not tried the Fuji's in-camera B&W either. Sorry, I'm not that much help there! The in-camera JPEGs are really good though, saving a lot of effort in some circumstances. If I'm doing anything serious I shoot raw too, but frequently find that I only really *need* the raws for a few shots. For less serious shoots or ones with a large number of frames I usually don't bother with raw on this camera, and the results are generally still tonally as good as I'd have got with any other camera and full raw fiddling.

 

According to dpreview's tests, the dynamic range is stops better than even the newest Nikons. (see

 

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilms5pro/page18.asp

 

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond300/page20.asp

 

and even

 

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/NikonD3/page20.asp

 

) - I've not yet had the opportunity to test any of these, but certainly the S5 is leaps and bounds better than the 10mp and 6mp Nikons for dynamic range. As for noise, the new generation probably beat it but it's better than anything earlier - and when it does show, it's not particularly offensive (colour blotches are well suppressed, so it doesn't look objectionable in prints). On the other hand, the D200 and higher models all beat it for detail.

 

It has a subtle colour quality which I haven't seen on anything else either. It's like, I don't know, that moment in the film days when I first started shooting Provia slides rather than generic Kodak colour tourist print film. Even the automatic white balance is alarmingly good.

I've used both, love the S5 to death, and think it's absurdly cheap at its present price if the reductions where you are are as good as they are here in the UK (proportionally speaking). It's a great buy at the moment.

 

The S5's supposed "reduced speed" is really not all that big a deal unless you are a sports motor-drive fiend - and since you have a 200 anyway you're not missing the capability. If you mostly shoot "semiauto" (clicking fingers) it's as responsive as its illustrious parent. The smaller histogram and rather different menu layout (not actually bad, just rather not like Nikon - what on earth were they thinking?) are a bit of a pain - on the other hand, once it's set up right you can leave most things there.

 

If you love tones, buy one soon as you can. The tones, shadow and highlight detail, noise, and DR are all great. If you obsess over per-pixel sharpness as seen on screen at 100%, you might not be satisfied. It records a lot of detail and produces fantastic prints, but it's quite hard to get a 12mp image out of it that looks sharp at 100%. It can be done, but it took me a while and it's rather more exacting than really necessary for printing (per-pixel sharpness being a bit of a strange subjective measure). (Give me a shout if you want to know my tactics for this).

 

Don't buy Fuji's raw converter. It can give awesome tonal results but using it is pretty painful - and s7raw is easier, sharper and free (but I don't trust the NR). On the other hand, the 6mp JPEGs straight out of the camera are so good that it's very frequently not necessary to spend time with the RAWs at all, which is quite an advance over just about any other camera I've tried.

I have a D40 and I don't really agree with Shuo Zhao's comment about the D40 interface being menu dependent. I never seem to need to delve into the menu system when using mine. It has only one control wheel, so most controls are button + wheel (aperture, exposure compensation, ISO, flash compensation) - hardly anything you need to set during a shoot is in a menu, and the menus are pretty clearly laid out. It's not at all like using a compact - and it has all the speed and responsiveness you'd hope for.

 

Yes, there are better cameras out there - but real improvements in capability are expensive, and I don't think anything will beat the 40's price/performance ratio. I do use more sophisticated cameras, and their features are good things, but I don't find the D40's supposed drawbacks matter all that much in practice. Also, the D40 is tiny and has an amazing battery life, and that means it's usually the one I'm carrying when I'm somewhere interesting. This is a major factor!

 

I can't really speak for the other makers, but a cursory examination of galleries here and on Flickr suggests that all are pretty capable in the right hands. If they still have real camera shops where you are, the slight premium over web prices is usually worth it for the advantage of being able to handle several cameras and buy the one you actually like using - which is more important than most minutiae of specification, and can't really be tested online.

I strongly suspect that it will print absolutely fine on an inkjet without needing to upscale it.

 

The 300dpi guideline is too widely applied. Very few print processes are capable of resolving anything like that much. 300dpi is specified by the publishing industry who are using 4-colour presses, not because that's how fine the presses resolve, but because each colour in the press is printed through a halftone screen which is usually 150dpi or thereabouts. The files need to be much more detailed than the end result in order to avoid moire artefacts caused by overlapping the halftone and pixel patterns.

 

In the inkjet world, everyone seems to have carried this 300dpi over like a superstition. However, the inkjet is not printing through a screen, so moire is not a problem. If you print a 150dpi file, it'll be about the quality you see on a good-quality illustrated book, for exactly the reasons outlined above. Your customer is unlikely to be disappointed by this unless he's a very picky individual! You can always print an A5-sized piece of the image at 150dpi as a test first if you're worried about ink wastage, but I'd probably just go for it. (You have enough pixels for about 165 dpi if I count correctly)

 

Attempting to upsize by interpolation will not grant a better quality image at these sizes. You may even lose sharpness. For inkjet prints, upsizing is necessary only when enlarging by a rather larger factor (40dpi will certainly not look satisfactory up close - but that would be an A1 print!). My only major warning would be not to oversharpen - the crispy per-pixel sharpness that looks good on screen (like you get with unsharp mask at high strength and very low (fractional) radius) is OK at 300dpi but often too strong for a 150dpi print.

If you put a lens with no chip onto the D40, it *will* work - but only in full manual mode, which takes a little

getting used to. In fact, for a T-mount lens like this, pretty much any camera will only work in manual - it's a

limitation of the lens, not the D40.

 

Brief instructions: (Pardon me if any of this is too basic)

 

- Mount the lens. Don't panic about the error message.

 

- Turn the mode dial to M. Set the ISO to 800 and set the shutter speed to about 1/800.

 

- Go outdoors in strong daylight. This lens does not gather very much light, so it will be difficult to use in

dark conditions. You might want to try using the biggest, heaviest tripod you have available.

 

- Aim, then focus manually. (Do not expect the green focus-confirm light to work with this lens - it does work

with manual lenses but only at wider apertures.)

 

- Shoot, and immediately examine the image review. If the image is totally dark or totally light the exposure is

way out, change the shutter speed by eight clicks of the dial in the appropriate direction (higher

numbers/shorter times if too light, lower/longer if too dark) and try again. If there is some image, check the

histogram, which is a representation of how the lights and darks in your image are distributed. It is unlikely

that the exposure will be absolutely correct, since it was just a guess. You want to set the shutter speed such

that the histogram tails neatly off off at each end rather than slamming into the end of the graph at a high

value. See the four blocks the graph is divided into? Moving the shutter speed dial four clicks (1 1/3 stops)

moves the tones on the graph by about that amount, higher speeds -> less light -> graph moves down. Use this to

work out a corrected exposure (easy with a little practice) and shoot again.

 

If you want to hand hold this combination, you will probably need a shutter speed in excess of 1/2000th of a

second. Experimentation will reveal how rarely available light will let you do this.

 

---

 

It should be possible to get acceptable images by this method, but they will never be technically great and it

will often be frustrating. Just to prove it *can* be done, this

 

http://pics.livejournal.com/raygungothic/pic/0003hf67

 

was shot using a T-mount full-manual lens (not the Kenko, but not a good lens either) and the above process. On

the other hand, more expensive lenses are more expensive for a very good reason - far better quality and a lot

more convenience.

I quite like The Gimp as a free (and really free - open source everything) editor - awful name, slightly clunky interface, but actually pretty powerful. I often pull down a copy when I'm using borrowed machines with no Photoshop, as it can do a surprising amount of basic PS jobs and keeps getting better all the time. I'm not sure about RAW in it as I've never tried - I believe it can be done through a free plugin but not in the core program.

 

If you're in consistently bright sunshine, the custom white balance method has a great chance of working. If there is fast-moving patchy cloud and the light level keeps changing you have more problems - the light colour changes with it and you taking new WB readings is a bit of an interruption. That would be a good time to be shooting RAW, where you can just get it right later.

It won't work.

 

Lenses aren't perfectly sealed. Zooms are worse, but even primes contain plenty of moving parts (focus, aperture ring) and hence allow some dust migration. The mount's not flawlessly dust-proof either; the lenses with a rubber sealing ring might be better but still aren't perfect (and seem to be mostly zooms anyway).

 

Not all dust is related to lens changes anyway. Manufacturers try to assemble the cameras in pretty clean environments, but costs would be a lot higher if all assembly were the highest grade of dust-proof, so there is some dust in all cameras on the day they're made. Then you start using the thing, and the shutter starts blasting up and down at incredibly high speeds. It's designed to hardly wear at all, but sooner or later it will and generate tiny specks. Somewhere in the mirror assembly there must be some kind of soft cushion, too. Old ones were foam - I've not poked my dSLRs in detail so I don't know what they use now, but all possible soft cushions are nightmares if you're trying to maintain a contaminant-free environment. Goodness knows what other materials there might be in a modern dSLR that might not be archive-stable and hence might shed a flake here or a speck there - but I'm pretty sure it's impossible to make so complex a device without any such materials.

 

I have read somewhere (but can't find the reference, sorry) that newer dSLRs have better internal design that reduces the rate at which they generate tiny particles through wear, compared to older bodies (and particularly film-era-derived ones). I find this easy to believe (this only became a high priority in camera design very recently!) but I bet they're still not perfect - no device really can be.

 

Sad to say, there seems to be no escaping dust.