Thanks for posting this. It's fantastic, and fascinating in the way that it exploits so many Japanese cultural traditions, old and new. I would imagine that it hits many of the right spots in its target audience.

If you are not averse to spending a little money, do check out Lightroom. MacWorld said this of the latest iteration: "Busy photographers may view this as the release where they can let go of Photoshop."

For me, in a word, speed. Yes, you can set up actions for batch-processing etc. in PS, but it's just so easy in LR4. Can't do any kind of compositing though. So I agree with other posters that you probably need both.

Plus you get a nice cataloguing system. What's not to like?

PS I get an education discount, and Adobe are generous - so take this with a pinch of salt if cost is an issue.

That's interesting. I thought they used the same focus system. It was only the relative lack of customisation that put me off the D5100.



I assume that they want to control DOF. You choose a stop and keep your eye on the assigned shutter speed: if it drops below a safe value, you adjust the ISO. The D7000 will go pretty high before the noise gets bad. As I recall, in the bad old days, before programmed cameras were invented, I only ever shot in aperture-priority or manual anyway.

Thanks for the posts here—most useful. I have been messing about with the focus on the D7000 because I'm getting some weird results, such as portraits shot wide-open in bad light where the camera focused on the ear when I'd locked it on the eye. (IE about 6 inches back of where I thought it was.)

My tentative conclusions are:
-that it doesn't like to focus on high-contrast edges, and has trouble with bad light (probably should use AF-assist illumination)
-that the D9/D21/D39 settings, which only work in AF-C (or AF-A) mode anyway, randomly reassign focus points when something moves slightly, even though the manual suggests they will track what you have locked onto
-that the single-point focus is the way to go most of the time (seemingly confirmed by posts here)
-that the colour-based 3D mode is pretty good for action, especially in good light—and you can easily see when it loses the subject and adjust very quickly
-that adjusting focus points for lenses is a last resort
-that the Auto-area mode is enough to drive anyone crazy, as it never seems to chose the thing you want to focus on! (I don't know what Rockwell does to make his work.)

Do others concur?

I started reading KR because he is so entertaining. I still go to his site for that reason, but, as a D7000 owner, for example, I find his site also useful in a practical sense.

It should be apparent that he is extremely opinionated, and that he likes his pictures to look a certain way. If you don't want your photos to look like his (which I don't), then don't follow his advice on settings literally. But the great thing is that he thinks like an image-maker first, and as a technical critic second. He is usually right, I find, about how good a camera is to use in the field, and he tends to prefer equipment that works well over less well-designed things that produce the ultimate in technical performance. He gets positively apoplectic about pixel-count inflation, for example, which is no bad thing, even if he does rather overstate the case.

Or look what he says about the Fuji X100, a deeply flawed camera according to many people. He immediately tells you how he uses it and what for, and how good it is for that. That's more valuable to me than exposure accuracy graphs or lengthy comparisons of tiny details from specially shot sample images. (Although I do look at these too.)

In short, there's usually a good reason why he likes or dislikes something, even if you don't agree with his assessment, and he's not being paid by a manufacturer to say so (and as Brits, we are even free of his endorsement of Adorama).

A couple of points:

Firstly, I'd like to say that I think that the strategy you are adopting, Linda, is really good: take a test shot, and then choose the exposure mode to shoot in that gives you the picture you want.

Secondly, having viewed some of the metering guides suggested, I'd like to add that there is an often-overlooked third parameter in metering: ISO. Today's digital cameras allow you to set auto-ISO, which is both good and bad.

Good, because you can rely on the camera to raise the ISO automatically if the light suddenly falls below the aperture range of the lens you have, at a useful shutter speed, and give you your shot, albeit at the cost of noise—but sensors are so good these days that you often don't get noticeable noise below ISO 1600 at the least.

Bad, because the camera will still adjust if the meter is "fooled", for example for a small brightly-lit subject against a dark background, even though you have carefully set aperture and speed in manual mode. I've ruined a good few shots that way! I.E. these days, we need to remember to disable auto-ISO, and/or set ISO manually, as well as setting the other 2 parameters, if we want to control exposure completely.