nikon d60

wow, nice! I'm planning to buy one next week. I usually visit this photography tutorial site digital-photography-school.com I hope this will help you. I learn a lot from there too. Hope you can update me with your new experiences with D60. ;)

You made a good choice, green_peace and I am sure you will get a lot of pleasure from it. To get you started, let's sort out those letters. P stands for PROGRAM mode. When the camera is set to P it operates just like AUTO but allows you to set or over-ride some settings if you want to. S is SHUTTER Priority mode. When you set S, you can select any shutter speed and the camera will set the corresponding aperture. A is APERTURE Priority mode. You choose the lens opening (aperture) and the camera takes care of the shutter speed. As you can see, both S and A are "semi-automatic" exposure settings. You new Nikon still does all the calculations to figure out the right exposure. If you halve the amount of time the shutter is open, it just doubles the size of the hole (aperture)and if you double the aperture size, it halves the time the shutter is open. M is different. While P, S and A ensure that the exposure is correct by balancing your choice with its readings, M ignores any exposure readings the exposure meter makes. It assumes that you know what you are doing and lets you get on with it. You can still see what setting it recommends, but if you choose to ignore them, that is fine. Of course, if you do ignore the camera's readings, you will need to have some other way of deciding on your settings. The traditional way if by personal judgement and experience, and by using a separate exposure meter. Since you don't have either experience or a meter at the moment, I suggest you spend the present time using the camera in P and experimenting with Exposure Shift and Exposure Compensation (see www.qassia.com/program_mode-for-creative-photography). As you gain some confidence, you will want to use priority modes when the camera doen't quite get what you want: typical subjects that benefit from S control are flowing water, where you need an exposure of 1 or 2 seconds to create a creamy, dream-like effect, or shooting running horses and birds in flight, where 1/4000 of a second might be needed to capture the action. You will also notice some landscapes could benefit from having a bit more sharpness throughout the scene: changing to A mode and setting a small aperture (large nunber, like f/22) will help achieve this; while your portraits and close up pictures of flowers might look better if you set the Aperture to a large setting (small number like f/3.5 or f/2.8), which will tend to throw distracting backgrounds into soft focus and concentrate attention on your subject. You will find a lot more detail on these and other photography questions on my qassia page (www.davidarich.qassia.com/); and if you want to see if my advice is worth following, you can see the results at www.davidrichphotography.org ~ have a great time with your new camera, and show us some pics. David

Yes I just bought a Canon DSLR and I was lucky enough to have someone who could show me a few things but i still have a lot to learn, I also learnt a bit from the net, here is a link I found for you that may help you.. good luck.. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081028072626AAyw8Jl