boston_bob_the_photographe

<p>Arthur, I feel silly. I have two D300'S and I should have known that! I was tired and I thought we were talking about a D90. Just goes to prove you shouldn't believe everything you see on the internet. Thanks for catching this.</p>

<p>Most retail camera stores aren't setup to take a customer's RAW files and create jpeg though an 'enterprising' individual at the camera store might be offer to do something like that for such a price.</p>

<p>It is a reasonable price if each jpeg is custom adjusted and cropped. It is still unconscionable since that is not what Terry needs at this point.</p>

<p>Summarizing some of the earlier postings - I'd suggest that Terry do the following</p>

<ul>

<li>Set the Write Protect tab on the SD memory card. To do this, when the memory is out of the camera, look at the printed side of the card. Near the top left of the card is a slider. Move that slider down. That will help prevent inadvertent erasure of the files.</li>

<li>Try asking the technology instructor at the local high school to recommend someone who can help you. There are high school students would be happy to help. Perhaps for free as a part of community service. Perhaps for a few dollars. On a decent computer, it will only take about 10 minutes to convert all the files and somewhat longer to copy them to a CD.</li>

<li>On a computer that doesn't have any photo software, the Dr. Chung preview extractor I mentioned above is the easiest and quickest way to get jpeg files out of your NEF files. There's no setup to run. Just a single executable file. It doesn't change anything on the computer. Nikon embeds jpeg files inside their NEF files and the preview extractor literally copies jpeg files from inside the NEF files.</li>

</ul>

<p>Here's a retouch done by Portrait Professional at its default settings.</p>

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<p>To address Apurva's follow up question about the comparison between 17-55 on DX and 24-70 on FX. Yes, the results are comparable. Both of them are killer sharp. This is a subjective evaluation. But I have used the 17-55 on the D300 (same sensor as D90, I think) and the 24-70 on the D700. And I'd say the 17-55 is the way to go.</p>

<p>Peter Hamm brings up that a D700 is more satisfying to use than the D90. If you are taking that into account, then the D300s is the body to get with the 17-55.</p>

<p>The D700 is the way to go only if you are doing low light photography and need the sensor with the extra stop of light or if you are doing wide angle and need the full frame for that. Otherwise, the D300s is pretty much the same as the D700 and gives you video and dual card slots.</p>

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