Jumped to the digital band wagon.....

Mfire1

New member
Greetings all!,
Decided to graduate to the digital combination photography world recently.
Have been in 35mm film since the early 70's. Have been off the shutter for a number of
years. So I thought retirement is coming and why not outfit up now so all the farkels can
be afforded. So I read up and researched and found the most excitement from the general
shooting public that the D7200 was the way to pursue. And a combo lense deal was out there
and I jumped off the bridge and fell.
And now the learning experience started, a very impressive piece of shooting equipment.
Amazing coming from a Minolta SRT 101 and a pile of Lenses.
Now to add a couple more lenses to the Pelican case.
Looking at a Landscape zoom, also a Macro, and finally a 200-500 Telephoto.
Looking forward to an enjoyable experience as my photo eye comes back to life......
Wish me Luck!
 
Welcome to the forum. Now show us some photos

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spb_stan

Senior Member
The move to digital is usually very painless because experimenting is free and instant. Before, when taking bracketed shots or experiments, you needed to write all the details in a notebook and wait for the processing lab(and cost) to see the results and related them to the notebook entries. Now, few even bother with light meters since taking a shot and viewing it is just as fast and saves $500 which good light meters cost.

One thing that is different is what focal length to use, the field of view is narrower on a crop sensor camera than would be seen with the same focal length on 35mm full frame. The framing of a subject in a shot using the Normal lens...50mm, has the same field of view as a 75mm lens on your film camera. As a result, your landscape lens choices means a lot wider than your experience tells you. 10-20 mm zooms are suitable, whereas 10mm on full frame would be a fisheye ultra wide.

There is a lot of very effective automation in new digital cameras, but with using flash, going to manual exposure mode is best and easiest. Shoe-mounted flash are so much smarter and capable than the old days, so is more useful over a wider range of lighting conditions. Manual focus was easier on fast primes with film however because of those great viewfinder focusing screens. Missing those micromesh screens means relying on autofocus for most shots except macro, is best. Macro still needs manual focus.

Digital has wider true dynamic range than film but easier to blow highlights because it has a linear sensitivity response that is more accurate but less forgiving than film. Flim had linear response only in the mid tones and compression at the extremes of bright and dark. Every image is processed either in the camera in the case of viewable JPG file format or in your own computer in the case of Raw NEF file format. Raw has more color and luminosity data so critical images to be printed large really should be "developed" in your computer if you want to do any editing or post-processing. The range of options in post-processing is very very great and is a steeper learning curve than learning the basic photography. Shooting in JPG format results in smaller files and some loss of data but is still better in rendering than any printer or computer screen, but allows less variation is post-processing. Making any edits to a JPG file and saving it results in passing through a compression algorithm that tosses out a lot of data. So each time you make changes and save them, the image quality drops a lot so be careful with original JPG image files, do not serially edit them. You can save one as a copy of the original so you can edit true copies of the original so you always have an original file quality to edit and compress once for each print or display size you want. Working with RAW files resolves that problem, edits are not changing the file at all, it only creates a list of adjustments to make, in a separate file that tells how the raw image will be rendered for screen or print. A lot of digital beginners start out shooting in JPG and after a few edits ruin the quality of the original file without realizing the compression process tosses out so much data which they can never retrieve.
Post processing is a whole additional hobby or skill and impact image quality a great deal. Any really compelling images you see are usually by a photographer who has post-processing skills.
There are lots of software programs out on the market that do the post-processing. The industry standard two are from Adobe: Lightroom Classic CC and Adobe Photoshop. Adobe does 90% of what most photographers will ever need and is easy to learn. Photoshop is a much more complex and advanced program that can take years to become really proficient but almost all high-quality images used in commercial photography is processed in Photoshop.
Adobe has switched to a subscription model where a monthly fee is charged instead of one time payments of hundreds of dollars. They have a very reasonably Photographer's Bundle of both Lightroom and Photoshop for $9.99/month. This should be considered.
There are dozens of post-processing programs out there but none are supported as well with add-ins, tutorials, youtube free instruction etc and everyone seems to know them so learning has more aids. Basic Lightroom functions can be learned in less than an hour but there are a lot of features which can be grown into which are pretty sophisticated. In my own workflow, 80% of all my images are processed only in Lightroom but the remaining 20% are the more serious for printing large or glamour retouch are post-processed in both Lightroom and Photoshop. This can be very time to consume, not because it is hard or takes a long time per image it is just that with digital, you end up taking a heck of a lot more frames than anyone could afford in film. A typical wedding might generate 2000-3000 images, of which 50 become part of the book.
Good luck and have fun, you have a great camera that is capable of amazing images.
 

Bikerbrent

Senior Member
Welcome aboard. Enjoy the ride.
We look forward to seeing more posts and samples of your work.

I too have used the SRT101, but you will really enjoy the D7200. As others have mentioned, digital is so much easier and cheaper to experiment with.
 

carguy

Senior Member
Greetings all!,
Decided to graduate to the digital combination photography world recently.
Have been in 35mm film since the early 70's. Have been off the shutter for a number of
years. So I thought retirement is coming and why not outfit up now so all the farkels can
be afforded. So I read up and researched and found the most excitement from the general
shooting public that the D7200 was the way to pursue. And a combo lense deal was out there
and I jumped off the bridge and fell.
And now the learning experience started, a very impressive piece of shooting equipment.
Amazing coming from a Minolta SRT 101 and a pile of Lenses.
Now to add a couple more lenses to the Pelican case.
Looking at a Landscape zoom, also a Macro, and finally a 200-500 Telephoto.
Looking forward to an enjoyable experience as my photo eye comes back to life......
Wish me Luck!
Welcome to the community :)
 

Nero

Senior Member
Welcome. I just recently picked up a Nikon F4 and I'm tempted to try it out so I guess I'm going through a transition just like you. haha

Also, you will love the D7200. It's a great camera.
 
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