(Another) New Toy

I mentioned before that I've been looking around for another camera and after a lot of soul searching I came to the conclusion that as much as I like compacts I need at least an APS-C sensor and that means spending serious money on something like the gorgeous Fuji X-Pro1 but those are four figures just for the body and a single lens.

Beth's already got a Nikon SLR, a D7000. It's her second and she had offered me the loan of her old Nikon SLR, the D60, but that doesn't do bracketing and bracketing is One True Way™ to get great images, of landscape at least.

And then I was idly looking at a second hand camera site and they were selling the D5000 at a very reasonable price. I took a look at the spec. It sat between the entry level and the D90 (which preceded Beth's D7000) but it had bracketing. Promising.

Having talked to Beth about this I looked some more and on Monday came across a D5100 body for sale at MPB Photographic at a very reasonable price. The D5100 is an upgraded version of the D5000 with the same sensor as the D7000. So I grabbed it and it came today.

It's only taken just over 4000 shots and it's in mint condition without a mark on it. I've got Beth's "kit" lens from the D60 on it for now, an 18-55mm¹ F3.5-5.6 zoom but I'll probably buy something else for it for my birthday. The Nikon 18-200mm is currently the front runner.

Anyway I've been out this evening and taken a few photos and updated my import script to suck the images off the camera so it's now a case of learning how to drive the thing.

1. So 27mm-83mm in film camera terms: "DX" sensors as found on most digital SLRs being 2/3 the size of a 35mm full frame "FX" sensor.