I impulsed purchased a nikon d3000 last night at costco, it was $650 with a big camera bag, 4 gigs of memory, standard lens and 200mm zoom lense of some sort. It also came with some instructional DVDs. I have been looking around and decided that the d3000 was a good entry level purchase for me, and almost everywhere I looked was selling it for 550 with only the standard lens. The way I see it the $100 got me a bunch of extra junk that I might buy anyway for more money. 

I took it out last night and messed around for an hour playing with manual settings I know little about.  I took about 60 pics and maybe ten are ok. I have a super light-weight tripod I use for backpacking, and because it can wiggle around that messed up some of the pictures. Let me know what you think, I have no basis for judging if these are crap or not, but to me they are interesting.

 








Anyway, one of the reasons I purchased this camera is because I'm heading on a ski trip to telluride CO for the next couple days.  I have a messed up knee and arm right now, so I think I'll have lots of down time on the mountain to play with my new toy.  Does anyone have some tips for taking pictures in the snow? The forcast show clouds the entire time, to me that means boring pictures.  Can anyone can tell me what settings I should be playing with when it's flat light out?

Thanks all, I'm sure I'll be in this forum a little more asking questions.   

clouds are good



shoot lots of portraits



just meter off a grey card or your hand not the snow

The light meter assumes the world is grey, so when you shoot in snow, it's going to make the snow grey unless you set the exposure compensation to +1.0'ish.



Clouds are good for lots of subjects, especially people.  No hard shadows like you get with sunshine.



 

Tempe Town Lake....

The last 3 pics aren't bad.  They're about what I was doing when I first got my D80.  Let me suggest picking up "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson.  It taught me quite a bit when I first "jumped" into the dslr world.  Also, get yourself a Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens.  New they're around $130 and it's an excellent lens.

It won't AF with the D3000... better a 35 1.8 since 50mm on a FX body is too long for indoorsy stuff, where fast glass is mostly used.

better than anything I've taken with mine.

Yup, I have the 35mm 1.8 afs (~200 bucks) for my D5000, its a great setup for fast stuff.  A great basic setup with a D3000 & D5000 (D40/D60 too) is the 18-55mm, 55-200mm, and the 35mm 1.8 (all afs).  

None of the lenses are terribly expensive either.

Shoot RAW and post process to your hearts content.
Nikon Capture is worth the money for the software.

This might be a stupid question, but are you using a delay when taking the pictures?  It prevents you from shaking the camera.