{"id":24,"date":"2008-04-22T21:15:24","date_gmt":"2008-04-22T13:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=24"},"modified":"2008-04-22T21:15:24","modified_gmt":"2008-04-22T13:15:24","slug":"but-my-face-is-oily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2008\/04\/22\/but-my-face-is-oily\/","title":{"rendered":""But my face is oily…:(""},"content":{"rendered":"

One of those effects of those weeks of spreadsheet-peering is that I\u2019ve become intimately familiar with pricing of camera systems, lenses and accessories. It\u2019s funny too, because currently right now, the local camera body prices for the Canon 40D<\/a> and Nikon<\/a> D300<\/a> are about on par with prices at say Amazon.com<\/a> – but lenses and accessories are dreadfully more expensive. If you\u2019re following my train of thought right now, you\u2019d also conclude then that buying the latter from online retailers would be a great idea – but as it is, these retailers won\u2019t ship to Singapore. Boo!<\/p>\n

\"blog-2008-Ling-DSC_0374a.jpg\"Still, Matt – our best bud up in Missouri – will be flying to Singapore next month to visit and staying with us for several weeks. Would you believe it – someone who\u2019s flying quite literally halfway round the world and paying a few thousand moola just to eat Roti Prata at Jalan Kayu, and especially when I think Jalan Kayu roti prata is so overrated. Anyway, I\u2019ve asked him to tompang a few lenses and accessories; so orders were made at Amazon.com<\/a> and I\u2019ll be having the items shipped to his home address prior to his departure.<\/p>\n

As for the camera itself, wow – the size of the 421 page manual says it all. There\u2019s a learning curve and more customization tweaks and options than you can shake a tree with. While exposure, metering and focusing techniques remain familiar, button layouts took a while to get used to. This was only my second Nikon<\/a> SLR, and things have completely changed since my old FG-20 23 years ago.<\/p>\n

Not only that, I\u2019m going to miss a few other things. Firstly, there\u2019re no scene modes. I\u2019m guessing that Nikon<\/a> believes that anyone who buys a D300<\/a> had better learn how to create their own custom settings for the scenes they\u2019re shooting. But while there\u2019re banks to save your customized options into, it\u2019d still be nice to have a landscape or a dusk scene on a mode dial somewhere for ah peks like me.<\/p>\n

Secondly, a couple of times I was wondering in the initial test shots eh how come the shot is so super underexposed when I realized that \u201cProgrammed Auto\u201d in the D300<\/a> isn\u2019t meant to be taken literally. You could have the mode set right there but because of some other esoteric option you\u2019ve changed in one of the gazillion menus, the shot you\u2019ve taken now is of incorrect exposure. And lastly, one of the very nice things the KM-5D had was to automatically create new folders based on date. That was a really nifty feature that allowed one to sort photographs easily when transferring back to the PC. That must had been a Konica-Minolta innovation because there\u2019s no equivalent option in the D300<\/a> (or maybe I just haven\u2019t figured out where it is yet).<\/p>\n

All that said, Ling\u2019s at least impressed with the shutter release sound that goes like a muffled \u201cker-(p l o c k)\u201d instead of the very loud \u201cKER PLAK\u201d in the KM-5D. She said it sounds a lot more \u201cpro\u201d haha. Another difficulty I had with the old DSLR was how tough it was to determine if pictures were in focus during playback zoom. The higher resolution LCD in the D300<\/a>, one of the much touted advantages over the 40D, is thus a godsend. Zoomed all the way in, one could easily see if pictures had been taken in focus, and I, all of Ling\u2019s zits haha. She ran right into the bathroom to scrub her face after I showed her the above test shot.:) There\u2019s even a very useful option that displays during playback the focusing points used for a picture.<\/p>\n

So, all said and done, as painful as the purchase outlay was, I certainly have no regrets picking this. I imagine I would had been quite satisfied with the 40D too with the substantially lower as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of those effects of those weeks of spreadsheet-peering is that I\u2019ve become intimately familiar with pricing of camera systems, lenses and accessories. It\u2019s funny too, because currently right now, the local camera body prices for the Canon 40D and<\/p>\n

Read More "But my face is oily…:("<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[277,137],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-home","category-photography-cameras","tag-nikon","tag-d300","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-13-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}