Calling all Nikon D70/D70-S owners! I have questions

[Mark Farnik]

My parents offered to buy me a new camera for my 16th birthday (which is December 12th) so after much comparison, I got a Nikon D70-S with the 28-80 mm and 70-300 mm lenses as well as some extra goodies like a full size tripod, lens care/maintenance package, High Speed CompactFlash card reader, a 256 MB High Speed Flash Card, Deluxe Case, CapKeeper and screen LCD protectors for $909 plus $40 shipping for a grand total of $949 from expresscameras.com.

I just have some questions for anyone else who owns one (or a similar D70) as to how they like their cameras, lens quality, etc. Any answers would be awesome. I can't wait to get out in the field this spring and try it out. A lot of factors influenced me to get a DSLR, but mostly the time exposure abilities for capturing lightning is the biggest one. Hopefully this season will make up for last year's lackluster one and there will be lots of cool storms and twisters to take pictures of.
Any reviews, answers etc. would be helpful and appreciated
Thanks!
Thanks

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Originally posted by Mark Farnik
a 256 MB High Speed Flash Card

Just as a heads-up, you're probably going to want to get a biggest memory card. You can get a 1gb Ultra II card for pretty cheap nowadays, just let through pricegrabber.com .

 

[Mark Farnik]

Geeze, I didn't realize they were this cheap. One high ranked store has a Lexar 1 GB 40x High Speed card for $67.00!! :shock:
I'm going to show my mom tonight; she'll get it for me, no problem.
Thanks for the suggestion, Jeff!

 

[Andrew Khan]

Dude, if your going to be shooting in RAW (NEF), you will only be able to fit like a few on that small of a card, as Jeff said.

 

[Mikey Gribble]

Off the top of my head, I think you will get something like 43 pictures with the 256 MB card and about 145 with the 1GB card when shooting RAW. I don't know much about cameras and photography so I doubt I can help much. The only advice I have is to always shoot RAW, keep your ISO low, tripod the camera whenever possible, don't use the editing software that comes with the camera, and get photoshop before next season.

 

[Jay Cazel]

As Jeff has said get the bigger card. With that card (1gb Ultra II, which I have) you can get 178 RAW pictures with the D-70s on the best JPEG setting it is 290 pictuers. I have the D70 then I updated the firmware so now it is like the D-70s. Also if you shoot RAW you will need something like Photoshop to edit your picks. Starting out I would shoot JPEG at first to learn the camera then switch over to RAW later. If the lenses that you are talking about are the Sigma ones, they are good, not the best but good starting lenses. I am still using them until next year, but I will get a new Nikon lense, just have not figured out which one I want yet. Read the manual, play with the camera, have fun and you don't need to worry about film.

:::::EDIT::::: Also what Mike Gribble said about always shoot from a tripod when possible.

 

[Aaron Kennedy]

Shooting from tripod is overated for most shots... IF you know how to use the camera.

Two reasons to use the tripod: leveling and sharpness.

For leveling help off the tripod, I use the AF spots... it works quite well. I'm not sure how the AF squares are setup on the Nikon bodies though.

For sharpness on a digital crop factor body (1.5/1.6x), the general rule of thumb is 1/(Cf*Fl) where Fl is the focal length and Cf is the crop factor. For instance, if you are shooting with a 100mm lens, use at least 1/150. If you have steady hands, you may be able to get it down to 1/100. For extremely important shots, I try to use 1/2Fl off tripod... hasn't failed me yet. Second of all, no matter what the focal length, shutter speeds at or lower than 1/60 but faster than a second or two will be less sharp due to mirror slap. Use mirror lockup and tripod.

Aaron