jwallphoto

I had the 18-55 on a D40. I did a head-to-head comparison with it at ~35mm vs. a Nikon F3 with a 50/1.4 and Velvia 50. For what it's worth, you can see it here: http://jwallphoto.blogspot.com/2007/12/film-vs-digital.html

 

I no longer have most of that equipment, by the way, having gone to a D200 and sold the F3, D40 and 18-55 (I kept the 50/1.4). Seemed like a good lens, and the whole D40 w/ 18-55mm made a nice backpacking camera, but I needed the $$.

If you're using outdoor light as fill, try setting your SB800 to TTL balanced fill flash, and dial exposure compensation, if necessary, on the camera.

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Get yourself a 2-stop split ND filter from Singh-Ray. Pricey but invaluable for keeping your skies from being blown out when your foreground is properly exposed. Cokin makes a holder for them, but you can hold them in your hand as well. Just be careful at the wide end that your fingers aren't in the picture. Use evaluative metering (assuming that's the functional equivalent of Nikon's matrix metering).

Check out the Olympus Stylus 1030SW. Looks tough as nails. There are previous iterations that can be had cheaper too.

Take a point-n-shoot camera, nail it to an old boot. Mount the boot on a pile of banana peels. Douse the pile with gasoline and set it on fire. Videotape the whole thing with another point-n-shoot. Now you are an artist. ;)

A fuller understanding of the term "outsider art" can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_Art

 

This might give you a different sense of what it is and how it's viewed by the art world.

Agitation is just getting fresh chemistry against the emulsion. My agitation when shooting fine-grained ISO 25 films was to simply turn the tank over and back one time "every so often". (I probably had a specific time, but it's been too long since I actually did that stuff and I no longer recall.) A friend used to give his tank a half-turn every so often, not even turning it upside-down.

AF-S kicks butt. I just went from D40 to D200, and I have a 105mm micro D-lens which is great, but with the D40 it had no AF ability. On the D200, the 105mm has no AF-S ability -- that is, no ability to manually change the focus while the AF is engaged. I'd gotten spoiled by being able to do that with my 300/4 AF-S, and it always seems weird to me when I try to do with the 105mm and can't.

I recently went completely digital, but I kept my 200mm micro and 50mm f/1.4 manual focus lenses. They work great. Since they are non-CPU lenses, though, you need to tell the camera which one you are using by going through the menu. Which reminds me, I need to see if there's a short-cut to doing that on the D200.

I shoot Nikon but went for the B+H multi-coated. I got the thin one since it's mainly for my 12-24mm, although I believe people are getting by with that lens without going thin. I wish I'd looked into it a bit further before purchasing because the thin version is trickier to use. I knew it didn't have filter threads in the front, but didn't realize that you can't even keep a lens cap on it. The filter comes with a cap, but I wouldn't trust it to stay on in nature photography conditions. In short, you need to clean it quite often.

I don't think any photo viewed at actual pixels will look sharp. Have a print professionally made from your file and see how it looks.

Fell in vat of maple syrup. Sold on ebay. ;)

Upload your pix to Flickr, create a set, and have people "view as slideshow".

Nobody mentioned the Alaska Ferry. Worth checking out.

http://www.dot.state.ak.us/amhs/