Welcome, I'm a Nikonian but will help any way I can. After a photo safari where a fellow traveler smoked me with his birds in flight shots using a Canon t4i, I moved up from a Nikon P500 superzoom to a D5200. So in a way, I owe my latest camera choice to Canon, I needed to be able to do that too! 5 frames a second with a 55-300 zoom lens is lots of fun... You'll like it here, great group of folks.

Welcome. I too am a Nikonian, but I certainly have great respect for all good gear. You have found a very nurturing place. Post some pictures in the gallery and you'll be surprised at all the good advice you'll get to take you to the next level. Haven't seen too many haters here, I'm sure few exist, but the vast majority of folks are just so nice!

Welcome, Zoey. Good to see someone soaking up good advice like a sponge from the super helpful people here. I've been doing the same and trying to help others as well. Looking forward to more from you, you've got a good eye. Just like me, getting used to all the settings for different types of photos can be daunting. Just stick with it. At least digital mess-ups are free! I learned a great deal from Tony Northrup's ebook from Amazon called How to Make Stunning Digital Photographs. It's designed for DSLR users, but you could learn a great deal for when that time comes. And he does explain the different scene modes on almost all cameras now, like the Sports mode suggested earlier to get you a fast shutter speed for those birds in flight. It's only $10.

Welcome, I've seen a few of your posts and have enjoyed them. I too am a computer guy, a software engineer by education and I have my own computer networking and repair business in Austin, TX. But, photography is beginning to take over my life... Looking forward to seeing more from you.

Welcome Dick. I grew up in DeKalb, down the road from you. Decided in 92 I didn't want to die shoveling out my driveway and have been in Austin, TX since. I also took snapshots as a child, but have only gotten more and more serious about photography in the past 10 years or so, move up the food chain through p&s cameras, then super zooms and now a D5200. Looking forward to seeing your images and posts.

I like the way the leading lines take your eye to the bridges. Good composition, good eye.

The first two photos were taken from the west with a tripod during a warm, yellow sunset. The closeup of the Goddess of Liberty was with a 55-300 Nikkor maxed out. The other two pictures of the Capitol were with an 18-55 Nikkor, the sideview at 24mm and the head on down the driveway at 18mm. I tried not to over process these, but capture the way I remembered the evening. These were done before some excellent advice at UHH suggesting I need to turn off the VR on the zoom lens when it's on a tripod to minimize vibration. They are a tad fuzzy when zoomed to the max, but I like them pretty well at regular resolution. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did spending the evening capturing them.

Texas State Capitol from west lawn


Goddess of Liberty from west lawn


Texas State Capitol from south drive

After further review....Diana is the winner! Nice job of bringing up what little detail was in the snow while keeping the subject bright. I'm moving on to editing some of my own stuff now. Hope to see more of everybody's work soon...

Thanks everybody! No mathematicians were harmed in the answering of my seemingly simple question.

I'll be 62 next month. Still playing singles tennis, need to stay in shape like you for the rigors of photography. Glad it's something we can do the rest of our lives.

Great shot. Most of my best ones have a story of danger and trepidation behind them, too. Or at least the inconvenience of the sunrises and sunsets intruding into our busy lives. Getting serious about photography forces us to stop and smell the roses...

Thanks, Pete, that cleared it up pretty nicely. And it wasn't post-graduate calculus.

This inspires me to continue to try to take what I do to the next level. Breathtaking, to say the least! I feel the same way about getting close to lions, rhinos, hippos, water buffalo (the list goes on and on of what I'm afraid of) when I'm doing photo safaris. I don't' want my tombstone to read "Great picture! It was his last..." Great shot, Regis!

Nice composition. The dynamic range is very good too. This is the look I go for naturally, but I usually have to resort to HDR or a bit of Lightroom magic. Well done!

I've read a few online articles and I understand a bit about different sized sensors giving you a different effective focal length than what's imprinted on the lens body. My question is, what is 1x zoom? Is it 35mm and everything else is a multiple of that? I read somewhere that a 55mm lens pretty much duplicates what the human eye sees in terms of magnification. With super zoom p&s cameras going out to nearly 50x zoom, it made me curious how that compares to say, my 55-300 Nikkor on a APS-C sensor. As the famous scientist Barbie once stated so eloquently "Math is hard!" So please try for a plain English explanation. Thanks, gang!