First Shots w/ First DSLR

napeequa55

New member
My fiancé and I took the new D5300 out to my family cabin this weekend to break it in.

This place is surrounded by wilderness and we saw plenty of wildlife and landscapes which are the two topics I'm interested in photographing.

All photos are with my only lens, the 18-144mm.

I'm uploading these from my iPhone, to which I transferred the photos via the Nikon Viewer app.

Snuck up on a few geese.

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Up close and personal with a male blue grouse.

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A couple of the property and view...

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It's a beautiful place!

I think we took about 400 over the weekend, had a really good time playing with settings. Most of the photos here were shot on auto though. High burst mode for the birds.

Also saw coyote and black bear but couldn't get close enough for decent shots with only 144mm. Maybe if I fall into a few thousand bucks I'll upgrade to a telephoto.

Can somebody tell me if these photos are GPS tagged or not?

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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Danno

Senior Member
Nice first shots... I am glad to see you are enjoying your new camera. That is a remarkable location you have. You are off to a good start. I would encourage you to work your way out of auto and take advantage of power of your new camera. I watched a lot of videos on the exposure triangle and played with aperture priority first just to learn about depth of field, than shutter priority and finally all manual. You do not need a monster telephoto to start either. A good Nikon 70-300 with VR can get you very close.

Congrats on a clearly successful first trip with the new camera.

Dan
 

napeequa55

New member
I would encourage you to work your way out of auto and take advantage of power of your new camera. I watched a lot of videos on the exposure triangle and played with aperture priority first just to learn about depth of field, than shutter priority and finally all manual. You do not need a monster telephoto to start either. A good Nikon 70-300 with VR can get you very close.
Dan

Thanks for the feedback. I have my eye on the 70-300 and will likely procure one as soon as I feel I'm ready to progress.

I have played with the A and S priority modes a little. Mostly the shutter priority where I set it to the highest setting to capture those geese in flight. I also tried to catch some humingbireds hovering using the fastest shutter but in both cases I came in way under-exposed. Lesson learned.

I also messed around using slower shutter speed on some white water to get that blending flowy effect. Ended up way over-exposed. So lots of learning to do there as well.

I think I also need to get off of the auto-focus when shooting animals. I ended up with a lot of shots that were focused on something besides my subject and this was frustrating. Using the focus ring on manual would probably be a better way to go there.

Thanks again for the feedback, looking for more suggestions if you have any!
 
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