First time nikon owner

Hello everybody. Just purchased our first dlsr camera today, nikon d5200. I had lots of advice when I was trying to figure out which camera to purchase. Now it's onto learning since I don't know much about a dslr.

Anybody recommend any good books to help with newbs and photography? Also, what kind of photo editing software should I be looking into?

hiya Papper. First thing I'd do is go to Nikon's Digitutor (Nikon | Imaging Products | Digitutor) and watch it's video. Then I'd sit down with the manuals and the camera and just go through the various settings to get familiar with them. After that, just take pictures and practice.

As far as Software goes the sky's the limit. Lightroom (less that $100 US) is an excellent program. It gives you the most commonly used edit functions and is a great Database Manager.

Congratulations for your choice of camera. The first book you should read came with your camera. It's the owner's manual. There is a lot of information about how to use the camera that you have to read first. Then, other photo books and/or Youtube videos and tutoring to help you grow with the camera.

Enjoy your Nikon!

Unfortunately, the D5200 is new enough that books are only starting to pop up. Owners manuals can be painfully boring to wade through, but it's a great exercise in learning your camera. Park it at the table with camera in hand and step through the manual, knowing that if you wind up changing settings you didn't mean to you can always reset your camera to factory default settings. Take a section at a time and then go out and shoot some pictures to enforce the learning. It really works.

I would suggest that you spend an hour or so online and get somewhat familiar with the basics of exposure. There are 3 basic parameters, shutter speed, aperture, iso. Learn how they relate to each other to create the proper exposure. Learn the advantages and tradeoffs of varying each parameter. THEN read the user manual. With exposure basics clear in your mind, the manual will make more sense. Except for autofocus modes. They will take some time to soak in.

Like backdoorhippie says, you can reset your camera if you mess things up. I go a step further and suggest that you reset your camera settings often for a few weeks to make yourself get comfortable diving into the menus to get your settings back.

I like to tell beginners to try Picasa free software. Very simple interface and you can quickly do minor tweaks without frustration. Fix redeye, straighten, crop, etc. You will get positive results quickly. Then as you learn the limitations of Picasa, you are in a better spot to know what you want from an editor/organizer. Picasa has a nice little feature to create a 'gift cd'. You put some pictures on a cd and it sets it up to auto-run a slide show. Really great to give to grandparents and other computer challenged people. Beyond Picasa, take a look at Lightroom and Photoshop Elements and the ViewNX that came with the camera.

Have you used a film camera before? A lot of what you know about photography with film is also applicable to digital. There are lots of books on the market about digital photography. Go to Amazon.com or others and use their search engine.

You do have several computer programs available to you for editing of digital images. I use Photoshop CS5 (Adobe is up to CS6 now, though I doubt I will ever need what is new over CS5) though it is a little pricey. Lots of people use Lightroom which is less expensive. I have never used it so I really cannot comment on it.

The one thing about digital that places it above film is that it is essentially "free" to use. Unlike film, you are limited only by the size of the flash card you use to how many images you can take. And once the images are downloaded or discarded, the flash card is entirely reuseable. And of course there are no processing costs associated with it.

Best of luck with it!

Thanks for the help. I ordered Scott kelbys digital photography book and understanding exposure. I've never used a camera like this, just little point and shoots so I need to learn about aperture ISo and all of that fun stuff. Took a few photos to try it out and I love it already.