In an effort to become a better photographer (and to get value from my expensive new camera), I’ve been taking random pictures of stuff whenever it occurs to me.

Sometimes I like them.

So I’ve been playing with the new camera, taking pictures of flowers and whatnot.  When I shot this:

I didn’t even notice the spider:

OK, I finally received the Nikon D60, ordered refurbished from Cameta Cameras on eBay.  This morning I ran around with it and my old Canon A570 IS, taking pictures of random things with each camera.

The short form:  In decent light, or with the flash, there was no meaningful difference between the pictures from each camera about 80% of the time.  Both cameras did a nice job.

Photo taken with an iPhone

And they both crushed the iPhone camera.

If there was a difference, 80% of the time the big camera won. There were a couple of shots that were (slightly) better with the little camera.

All pictures were taken on full auto with the camera making all the decisions.  (Except some I forced the flash off indoors.)

The little camera utterly failed to focus twice, yielding unusably blurry pics, but I reshot them.  Once the big camera kept the shutter open in the dark for maybe a full second, and I jiggled the camera, so I reshot that one.

On the whole, not as big a difference as I hoped.  I may not be enough of a picture snob to go through the extra effort of carrying around a bulky, expensive, delicate piece of equipment rather than the tiny one that fits in my pocket.

I’ll keep using it over the next month, and if I’m not fond of it, I’ll resell it on eBay, probably for about the same as I bought it.

So I ordered a Nikon D60 last week, on July 27.  On July 30, Nikon announced its replacement, the D3000.  Newer better camera, same price.  One always expects one’s technology to become obsolete, but it would seem my timing was bad.

Or it would have, except:

• The D3000 isn’t actually available.  One probably won’t be able to actually get one’s hands on one for months.
• I got a good price on the D60.  The D3000 will probably sell for close to its list price of $599 for a good while, so the older model was $200 cheaper for me.

What’s the difference?

• It has 11 autofocus points instead of 3.  This means nothing to me. Sounds good, but since I don’t have any experience with the D60 getting the focus wrong, I’ll have to reserve judgment.  My guess is the D60 does just fine.
• It has an onscreen Guide that apparently teaches one how to use aperture, ISO settings, and so forth.  Sounds cute, but I can read a book.
• It has a 3 inch screen instead of 2.5 inch.  Same (230,000 pixel) resolution, though.
• It comes with a slightly better battery, which apparently yields 10% more shots per recharge.  Whee!

In short, if I’d waited until today to make my buying decision, I’d still choose the D60 over the D3000.  (Or, frankly, the old D40 over the D3000, too.)

In doing the comparison, I noticed that neither the D60 nor the D3000 have “Live View,” meaning the display shows the image the camera’s seeing before you shoot.  I’m surprised. I rarely use the display this way, but sometimes I do, when shooting at hip level or when raising the camera over my head.  We’ll see how annoying that missing feature is.

As I write this, UPS still hasn’t shown up with the camera, so my promised comparisons are going to wait until tomorrow.

So I didn’t get a Canon T1i.  I also considered an Olympus 620, and a Nikon D5000.  Even toyed with massive overkill and a Nikon D90.

What really influenced me was the website of Nikon fanboy Ken Rockwell. He’s all over Canon for pocket cameras, but he swears an old Nikon D40 is kick-ass enough for anyone, even today.  $450 with lens, and theoretically as good or better pics than all of the above.

I didn’t get the D40, though, either.  I got a D60.

When it came out, everybody badmouthed the D60, because it cost a lot more than the D40 and wasn’t significantly better, at least not enough for the extra $300.

But in the last year and a half, the D60 has dropped in price, so it’s not $300 more.  In fact, I got one for $416 (refurbished) on eBay, about the same as a refurbed D40 would’ve cost.

The biggest difference between the D40 and the D60 is that the D60 comes with an Image Stabilization lens.  It’s 10 megapixels instead of 6, but I’m not sure that will make a meaningful difference — 6 megapixels is plenty.

I haven’t received the camera yet (Monday!), but when I do, I’ll no doubt be doing some tests on it against my little Canon, and I’ll see whether an SLR is worth the cost and bulk.

So my web research suggests I’ll be able to get better pictures under certain conditions (especially indoors without flash) with an SLR.

But which SLR?  One can spend thousands of dollars and still not get the best.

I’ve been partial to my Canon compact, and I already knew the user interface, so it had the initial edge.  I gave serious thought to the EOS Rebel T1i, which runs over $800  — but with some finagling, one can get it combined with a fancy $450 printer with a $400 rebate.  If I then ebayed the printer for $350 (plausible), the camera would effectively cost only around $600.  Not bad.  Especially considering I could probably eBay the camera for a profit if I decided I didn’t like it.

The things I liked about it:

• Brand-spanking new.
• Insanely high resolution display.
• Shoots movies (720p at 30 fps, or 1080p at 20 fps).
• Image stabilization. (I always hand-shoot, so reduced jiggling is sweet.)

What could have been nicer:

• No swiveling screen (I often find I shoot from hip level)
• Cost (In a year, it’s a sure bet there’ll be a better camera cheaper.)
• 1080p is nice, but 20 fps makes it a tease.
• Image quality maybe not the very best.
• Annoyance of rebate and reselling printer.

So I didn’t get it.  More tomorrow.

I’ve been using a Canon A570 IS for a couple of years, a perfectly serviceable compact camera I got for around $100.  It takes fine pictures as long as the light is good, but I’ve been envious of my friends who took better pictures than I could when the light isn’t so good.  So I started looking for a new camera.

At first, I thought I was going to get something like the Canon SX10 IS, a bulky camera with a 20x zoom and lots of megapixels.  But I stalled after getting bait-and-switched, and a couple of months of casual research later I realized that wasn’t the camera I was looking for.

I’ve never cared much whether a camera has removable lenses, and that always seemed to be the big advantage of expensive SLR cameras.

I now think that the big advantage of expensive SLR cameras is not the fancy removable lenses, but the huge-ass sensor.  SLRs have a sensor that’s about ten times the size as compact cameras, which theoretically means it can can get ten times as much light in the same picture.

It seemed to me that megapixels should be a good indicator of a camera’s resolution, but when I did comparisons with my camera at 2 megapixels and 7 megapixels, the quality of the pictures was almost indistinguishable.  Yes, the higher resolution image has four times as many dots, but the extra dots are mostly crap.

I’ve taken to shooting at only 2 megapixels, because it reduces my time uploading pictures from the camera, and the picture quality isn’t any different.  (Below 2 megapixels I started to see the difference.)

SLR cameras are expensive (maybe $300 at a bare minimum), and what’s worse, near as I can tell, they’re a total money pit.  Once you get one, apparently you start having inexplicable urges to buy fancy new lenses, and flashes, and tripods, and who knows what else.

More tomorrow.