Well now start posting pics for the enjoyment of all.

My first SLR camera was a Pentax. Had lots of good memories with it!

Post pics of those you took soon.

Quoted: I took a course a hundred years ago and it's always something that interested me.

In American years, that's like two months ago.

Quoted: Picked up my camera today..the owners manual is half an inch thick.. It has more bells, whistles, buttons and settings then a stealth bomber.. I haven't taken any pics yet. I need to format my computer so I'm going to wait until I do that to install the software. Picked up a 1gb memory card for it. That should hold me for a while.

Start shooting now.  There should be an automatic mode you can work with for now.  

Congrats now go get some pancake lenses.

Quoted: Picked up my camera today..the owners manual is half an inch thick.. It has more bells, whistles, buttons and settings then a stealth bomber.. I haven't taken any pics yet. I need to format my computer so I'm going to wait until I do that to install the software. Picked up a 1gb memory card for it. That should hold me for a while.

That is funny. Whatelse that puzzles me is that my Nikon D2H ("pro" camera and suppossedly more complex) has a thinner manual than the Nikon D70s ("consumer" camera) manual. I just picked up the D70s to convert to IR, hopefully in a few months.

Good first pics. Watch out for overexposed skies.

Quoted: Tks. One very helpful feature of this camera is the fact it will save and display the shutter speed, aperture setting,etc for each picture. So I can learn via trial and error what not to do..like over exposed sky. Can you explain what you mean?

The first and third pics in particular have very bright skies relative to the rest of the picture.  either zoom in more on the subject (if you can), or get a Circular polarized for your lens.  If you look at your LCD to check the histogram (see manual), the big tall bar at the right indicates that it's a bit overexposed.  

Read here

Quoted: Quoted: Tks. One very helpful feature of this camera is the fact it will save and display the shutter speed, aperture setting,etc for each picture. So I can learn via trial and error what not to do..like over exposed sky. Can you explain what you mean? The first and third pics in particular have very bright skies relative to the rest of the picture.  either zoom in more on the subject (if you can), or get a Circular polarized for your lens.  If you look at your LCD to check the histogram (see manual), the big tall bar at the right indicates that it's a bit overexposed.   Read here

Yep. It is also know as "blown" areas of a photo. Check to see if your camera has a "highlights" feature in playback mode. This feature will show potentially blown areas as blinking black areas in the photo when you are playing them on the camera.

The easiest way to correct for this is to meter for the sky and shoot the scene. Depending on how bright and how much sky is in the photo, your subject may or may not be underexposed.

To meter for the sky, point the camera at the sky so that it fills up most of the frame, and then lock the exposure and recompose. If the sky is too birght, you will have to make a decision to either blow out the sky, make two images (one exposed for the sky and one for the subject) and merge them together in Photoshop, or use a graduated neutral density filter.


Edit: Check out the book "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. Perhaps the standard when it comes to beginning photography books.

Cool deal. I need to get a digital SLR one of these days. I'm still stuck in the 35mm with SLRs.