Regarding the 18-55 VRII that is standard with the D3300 and D5300 kits, I have not seen a kit that shipped with the matching hood. It is not even included in the retail box packaging. For reference the hood for this lens is the HB-69. I have found some third party clones for about $8 including shipping.

One lens accessory I don't always use, but find useful occasionally, is a squishy rubber lens hood. For a short zoom or wide angle it is handy to have one if you tend to visit museums where a lot of the exhibits are under glass. the rubber hood can be pressed against the glass and form a "light gasket" that greatly reduces the possibility of reflections ruining your pictures. Admittedly this is not a great trick, and not something you would use for professional images. For those of us that travel a lot or go places with kids that want a picture of the lizard or snake or fish behind glass as a memento of that trip to the science museum, it can be pretty useful.

I am entirely too cheap and disorganized to invest in a real digital catalog software package for myself. For institutions and businesses I support, I have recommended and installed Extensis Portfolio. This is not for people that regularly move computers or rename things, but for businesses or professionals that have invested in dedicated storage hardware like NAS or a PC with a RAID controller in it designated as a file server, then Portfolio makes finding stuff really easy if you load images through the catalog.

Since most of my images are made for other people I tend to be pretty selective about what I keep because that is also what I give to the client. That might be a third of the volume I have to keep backed up. most of it is collections of pictures and video clips my spousal unit insists I keep. Many of those get collected and given to the school my kids attend and they get used in the yearbooks and bulletin boards around the school. after each school year I look at those that were selected and then throw out a bunch of fluff that was not. Keeping pictures of my kids, I can see, keeping pictures of other peoples' kids seems like a liability. The way my wife goes about organizing images to share is annoying. I end up with duplicates scattered all over the place. so I have an old friend called "DupKiller" you can download for free to analyze all the drives and let me know where islands of duplicate files are. This at least helps control storage growth.

This looks an awful lot like a Nikon F bayonet and electrical contacts to me. So if you look at the side of the lens, someplace, it may have N/AF or N/AFd. That marking is often on what would be the underside of the lens if it were mounted on the camera. (opposite the focus window and aperture index mark.)

That lens has been used a bit looking at the wear on the brass, and the mating of an aperture ring to a lens that has no AF drive in the mount is a little rare. So it's a non-G AF-S/HSM lens.

For video there will be a recommended minimum speed capability in the manual. For casual shooters, speed is not that important. where I notice the benefits of a fast memory card is not with the camera, but when I get home and transfer the images to my computer. a slow card will feel like files are moving at a glacial pace. so for my sanity I don't get the latest-greatest cards that are super expensive. I look at price-points and go for whatever is faster. for SD cards, that generally means I won't buy anything that is not at least a "class 10" or faster. for my CF cards I use in my Nikon D200, I try to get at least the 233x cards. The newest features seem to only be available in the current model higher capacity cards. so for the D5300 it seems like I can get what I want in a 16GB card for under $15, even though what I want are much smaller cards so it is not possible to lose too much data at once if a card fails. You might find this article useful: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388408,00.asp

I was given a Kodak instamatic in the 70's this was my first camera, I was 6. at age 10 I was given an old Ihagee-Dresden Exa with a handheld selenium cell meter and 3 lenses. this camera was made in about 1960 and it was the poor man's Exakta. It only had 5 shutter speeds. It had a manual that was useful, and my dad who was an accomplished photographer in his own right, taught me how to use it all together. So that was a pivotal piece of equipment for me.

Next step was my uncle who was a college professor that worked his way through college as a printer, then a photographer, then an editor of an award winning college newspaper. He taught all aspects of web and platen press printing, as well as photography and journalism to students at an Indian junior college. (courtesy of Bureau of Indian Affairs) He gave me a copy of a book that he had selected as his intro photo class textbook. It's called "Photo One" and was written by Ken Muse. the entire book is more like an elementary school workbook than anything else and it is full of line drawn cartoons. seems silly, but I can still remember the cartoon the went along with the sunny 16 rule today. That book drilled into me the very basics of what we think of as the exposure triangle today. it also covered basic darkroom practice and composition. That was a key instructional reference.

That uncle would let the nieces and nephews go with him to the college in the summer if they were interested and we were engaged in whatever he was doing. yes we were slave labor, but those were also teaching moments. I learned about exposure and what fine focus really meant making printing plates for the campus newspaper and most of the business forms that were also printed on campus. that was the last nail in the coffin for me.

I saw how the cameras worked, and enjoyed that challenge. I saw the science in the craft and the psychology of composition from the books and recognized those things became part of the bounded equations that help the camera record the picture you are creating. I saw the end product that most of the public will see, how it was made and all the bits that added up to this last stop in the process as I saw it at that time. It was then I know I would always be pursuing photography in some way.

That put me in a place to participate in high school and college yearbook and newspaper production and then used that experience to get into a partnership in a studio. It paid for college, cars and equipment, and left me with a lifelong pursuit.

I think my next pivotal move was when I started taking on novices as students. You have to revert to basics yourself to teach basics to others. There have been a few times when teaching others that a concept just clicked. that transition from knowing and doing, to also understanding so it is no longer just a rule, it becomes a reason. Understanding the reason makes it simpler to know when you can safely ignore a rule.

So what made the *single* biggest change? Teachers

Independence is good. One curiosity might be if he is playing college ball, especially if it is a big school, how much access will you have at the games? Just because you are mom does not guarantee courtside access. For practices and scrimmages and many minor games this may not be an issue, but NCAA and conference sanctioned games often have some pretty strict rules about access to the court. that might force your hand about the gear you choose. If you can't get close you may have to have a really long lens to get the shots you want.
Most any camera can do those things as well. the joy of a DSLR is that they are a modular system and you add what you need for a particular discipline. Using a Nikon D5300 for example, you will often get a kit that includes a lens, battery, charger, strap and some cables and software. charge the battery, put in an SD memory card and set the control dial to the green auto mode and it is not much different from a pocket point and shoot for difficulty. what it does do is go from off to ready in a second and you can fire several frames a second if you need to, or at least fire the shutter and have very little lag time from pushing the button to actually taking the picture. it makes catching the kids or pets "in the act" a whole lot easier than the "press and pray they keep doing it" action of a pocket point and shoot.

My D5300 came with a 18-55mm lens that is a new product. it is very small, collapsing onto itself when you don't need it immediately and it has image stabilization. in the film days this would have been equivalent to the 28-80mm zoom lenses that came with a lot of film cameras in the mid to late 90's. Still just as useful, and still the one you will usually leave on the camera in the bag. this works well for general sporting about town, taking pictures of the kids, parties, vacations, whatever. if you want to accessorize your kit for macro then you might want to get something like the 60mm or 105mm micro-nikkor lens that is highly adapted to focus very close to things to get the greatest possible magnification. If you want to take pictures of eagles on their perch you may not be able to get that close. the birds are skittish, and in most places there are laws that say you can't get closer than 200 yards just to avoid people bugging them. for this you can spend as much on a lens as you might spend on a new car and still feel like it is not enough. this is the realm of the super telephoto with focal lengths greater than 400mm. Sports can be just as bad. you need reach, long lenses, you also need light, so you will see these lenses in catalogs with f2.8 apertures made just for this kind of chore, and you pay dearly for them.

Just prove him wrong. Do any of the camera stores near you rent gear? it is worth asking around and see if you can rent a midrange or entry level camera body and a couple of lenses. it may not be cheap to do this for a couple of weeks, but it is probably cheaper than buying a camera and hating it. another possibility is to see if there is a photo club in your area that has good attendance. you don't have to have a camera to join the club, and most clubs will have at least one ovegeared member that is willing to loan gear to people. Some clubs have collections of gear for checkout as well. if you befriend a couple of the members, you might be able to get them to go with you to a few practice sessions and both of you take pictures side by side. this kind of mentoring has immense value. if you make a choice start small. get a camera with a short zoom. the Nikon 18-55 is a good general purpose lens, the 18-140 is even more versatile, but it costs quite a bit more. I don't expect this to get those action shots you want, but you need to learn the camera and this combination will work for lots of things besides sports. participate in some workshops or photowalks with a camera club or usually the camera shops will know a guy that does these kinds of walking tours where you get guided through some aspects of photography and how to work with the camera.

It's good to ask questions, and sometimes you will find a shop with well trained staff. No matter the training, none of them will be impartial. more often than not, the larger the retail showroom, the less likely those people will be versed in all their gear. bigger shops will usually have a Nikon guy and a Canon guy, but even then, they may not intimately know all the options of every camera in the line, just as often they work different shifts too so you have to visit more than once to get the full skinny.

hold the cameras and see what fits your hand the best. once you identify a couple in different brands that seem to feel pretty good, play with the controls and menus. Things you will change a lot include ISO, White balance, exposure modes, and autofocus modes. See how many of these things you can do with a button and a dial, or if it is going to take a bunch of clicks and scrolling through menus. Can any of these be done without taking the camera from your eye? will it always take two hands to make these settings changes? There are lots of different ways to do this and sometimes it varies even within the same brand. it may be that a Sony a77II has the control and menu logic that makes sense to you, or maybe a Canon T5i, or maybe a Nikon D5300. It may be that you get that magic fit in something more upscale. Or you may hold a Canon 7D and feel it is too big. It is difficult to find a current production DSLR that is junk, but you may find it has an ugly personality. you are going to be really close to this piece of machinery so liking it as a companion is important.

"Practice makes perfect"

Biggest bunch of hogwash.

"Practice make permanent, only perfect practice makes perfect."

Likely true but virtually impossible to achieve in something as subjective as art or photography.

I try to be a little more practical. I am a harsh self critic and I make a pretty clear distinction between images I take in "play and learn mode" vs. "family snapshooter" vs. "made to order" (paid gigs) vs. "individual pursuit" images I make for my own art or development. I look at my "bin rate" the number of images I throw away when I get them off of the camera. If that bin rate keeps dropping I am improving. when that happens I need to raise my standards and throw out even more.

As already stated, if you can post a few pics of the lens with some readable markings and a good shot of the bayonet and electrical contacts we can probably figure it out.

Flickr annoys me. it IS a good way to share images, but the controls are all or nothing generally. you can restrict access in a few ways, but the notable downside is that much like using the facebook albums, you are limited to share with everyone, or share selectively with those that have a Flickr account. if you have the paid, flickr pro account you can adjust these permissions more and even allow people to download the full sized image files. otherwise with the freebie account it is pretty much everyone on the web, or restrict to friends and family, or if you create a group you can restrict access to the group and only those that are group memebers can see the images. but it does require that they have an account to determine who is looking at the images. I have all of one album on Flickr, and I leave it there as a placeholder. if I were a more prolific shooter and cared what people thought I would use it as a brag site and publish everything to my "photostream" so random people would see new daily images and could post little snippets of praise or criticism. there are other free sites out there but since 99% of anyone I or anyone on my family cares to share photos with either has a facebook account or family members under the same roof do, we just share them that way. if there is a particular image they want, I can e-mail it to them per request, or I will post a few to a walmart.com photo album and send them an e-mail invite to that album and the can order prints to pick up the next time they go shopping. If you goal is to post professional images for clients, there are sites for that as well. smugmug.com might be a good place to look.

The images are scaled down for display, people can capture those if they want but the resolution is low enough that they would not be useful for printing, but perhaps for web sharing.
I don't know how ownership works. In the past this has come up and Flickr seems to insist on shared use of the images such that they won't get sued if an image in your photostream gets used for their promotion or is used in the photostream examples constantly scrolling across the Flickr landing page.
It seems to be safe. My son is now 6 and those 20 pictures of him being born in the hospital are still there. http://www.flickr.com/photos/27479291@N03/sets/72157605506251277/ I could not even tell you what permissions I set on this. I think I set it to share with anyone so we could just send a link in e-mail to the family list. Feel free to look. these were mostly take with a Nikon D200 in aperture preferred and posted straight to Flickr. so yeah, they are not art, they are snapshots.

Unless you are shooting action, reduced light should not be a problem. One of my acquaintances has a T2i and he says that he can get great results up to including 800ISO. Lower is better of course, but for prints no bigger than 8x12 or use on the web, it is fine even for details.

That much aside...

Canon's evaluative metering is pretty good most of the time, so don't be afraid to trust the metering of the auto modes. if it is foliage and general scenery, I would put it in the Av (aperture preferred) mode and pick an aperture suitable for the depth of field you desire. watch the shutter speed it is choosing and if that seems too low, then open up the aperture, or crank up the ISO. if it is daylight, you can probably get away with shooting most everything at 400ISO and F8. early morning or later evening light may require more ISO. a tripod or monopod IS recommended fro any scenic shots and a tripod is virtually a requirement for macro. one fun trick is to use the flash if you find a plant in bloom and want it to stand out a littl emore. open up the aperture to make the DOF more shallow, and use the flash as fill. the plant that I hope is closer to you will be illuminated more brilliantly and the more distant surroundings will be dramatically darker. if your shots seem dark on the screen, then use your exposure compensation to raise that to the point that it looks ok. it's good to know what a good exposure looks like on that screen so cheat and take a couple of reference shots in daylight where you are confident that they will be solid exposures and leave those at the beginning. in different light levels your perception of the brightness on the screen will vary as well, so it is important to have a reference. Sometimes if the woods have a broken canopy and there are spots of open daylight to deal with, those little hot spots in your picture will throw off the metering. so make sure you know how to dial in compensation before you leave home and just tune the exposure as you go.

Selecting RAW or RAW+jpeg is a good call. you never know what you may want to tweak afterward and raw will give you more freedom for post processing.

I have had little luck finding modern AFS nikkors this way but since I used a D200 with the focus motor in the body, the body driven AF nikkors are plentiful listed with film cameras on ebay and on craigslist. I am already pretty well geared so I have bought several of these and sold them to folks at the local photo club for good prices.

Also as a side note, from that generation of film cameras, the N75 was as far down the Nikon line as you oculd go that would fully drive af, afs, G, and VR lenses. so as a film camera to back up your digital kit it is a great camera to have.

Feel free to ignore most of this since I typed it in between phone calls and when I hit "send" there were already 10 more responses.

There are lots of good cameras out there. It might help to know what your budget is. what might be an ideal camera for a specific job might not translate well to the main use of the same camera. Remembering what you were shown in this person's class would be a start as to possible methods. You will want something with a little bit of "reach" so a telephoto lens is a need rather than a want. instant shutter response is a need as well, so that steers the choices to an SLR or one of the "mirrorless" cameras like the Nikon 1 series or EOS-M. I favor SLR systems for shooting action. Given the major systems available, it is probably fair to say Canon, Nikon or Sony would be solid choices. how much you can spend, and how much you want to "shop around" will play into this equation.

If you want to buy all new, a midrange camera body and then a slightly more upscale lens. If used is an option, deals will matter more than brands, if you found a Nikon 70-200 f2.8 vrII at a garage sale for $100, get that, and then put it on a new Nikon D3300 body. the chances of that are near zero since that is about a $2300 lens new. If you have friends or relatives that can loan you gear, it might be worth investing in equipment compatible with what is most available to you. So if uncle Eddie has a great collection of Canon lenses but only has a film camera to go with them, try to borrow or rent a Canon DSLR body and see if it will work with those lenses. If it works out well, then that may be a solid reason to Prefer Canon. If Eddie was a heavy user of Minolta Maxxum cameras, see if you can locate a Sony alpha series DSLR and see if those lenses will work correctly, many older Minolta autofocus lenses will work fine on the midrange and above Sony cameras. Nikon has the perk that there are a wide range of lenses from many manufacturers that will work and they have been produced over a long time span. Those show up in pawn shops on occasion and you can get real bargains. downside is that some of the older Nikon compatible lenses will require one of the more upscale Nikon bodies to work fully.

I think I mentioned this would get messy.

For me, I would get a Nikon D3300 kit. that is about $700 new, then add the Tamron 70-300 f4-5.6 VC USD lens, another $350-400. An accessory flash might be helpful but I would see what you get without it first.

I was eyeballing the D7100 since it came out. When the capabilities of the expeed4 chipset were advertised, I wanted to wait and see. I chose the D5300 more for the expeed4 processor than any other features it offered. considering how I am using it now, I would have been just as happy with the D3300. One of my moves since I have working in IT for 17 years, it to wait for about 6 months after anything new comes out before I buy it just to see how well it will be supported by the company and the community. The D5300 came out in November, I bought one in May.

The operating systems are different. In the film days I was an early adopter of Canon autofocus gear. The location of the controls drove me crazy so I sold the gear and went back to Contax. Later I tried Canon digital and had the same issues. My hands and brain follow the logic of Nikon more naturally. What I have seen in practice is that Canon shooters can adapt to Nikon pretty easily. Nikon shooters seem to get frustrated with Canon cameras pretty fast because the logic is very different. At the consumer level it is not as noticeable, but midrange and higher, the lines drawn between what gets a separate button or dial vs. what is buried in a menu seem to be a large source of the frustration.

Coming from several years of using of using Nikon film gear, when i got my first digital i didn't thing much would change. i already had lenses right? I didn't really change lenses when i was using the Kodak DCS420 (Kodak digital-converted N90)but once i started using the D70 a lot i saw the need to change. my 24-120 was obsolete at that point. i got a deal on the 18-70mm and have used it until it is now literally worn out. (it only took 9 years and 60,000 pictures) for a plastic barreled kit lens it turned out to be quite a useful part of my kit. I have retired it and am looking for a replacement. the 18-55vrII that came with my recent D5300 is optically better than the 18-70 ever was, but i miss that little extra reach. the 16-85 Nikon or the 17-70mm Sigma are what i am considering.

So far as third-party lenses, i have never been disappointed by any grade of Tokina lens ever, i have a 19-35(14 years) i used with film, and a 12-24 (8 years) that I chose over the nikon 12-24 because i borrowed both from a local dealer and after a few weeks i could not tell you which lens took which picture, so the Tokina saved me $600 with no regrets. i have a Tamron 70-300 that is about 16 years old i still use. Sigma has been more of a mixed bag for me. Some have been great, but i have had a few that were outright dogs. I still have a 28-105/2.8-4 from the film days, and it is sharp enough, but the gearing in the lens even on my N90s and D200 made that thing focus slower than a retarded snail. I have friends that have the 80-200/2.8 sigma lenses and like them, and lots of people with the 17-50 and the 10-20mm. the newer EX series with the HSM focus motors seem to be pretty decent.

I take pictures of kids and kids events mostly. i also shoot weddings and social events as paying gigs. the prime i use the most is a well worn 85mm f1.8, the zoom i used the most was that 18-70 nikon, (rest in peace buddy) and the 70-200/2.8 vr. those 3 lenses plus the tokina 12-24 and a TC-14eII teleconverter rounded out my default kit for the last 7 years. I would sometimes trade a lens out like swap the 12-24 for the 50mm/1.8 or Sigma 28-105 for lower light, or trade the 70-200 for the 70-300 for weight reduction if i was going to be on my feet all day.