The most wonderful woman in the world and I have been celebrating our thirtieth (30th) year of marital bliss.  We decided to make it a year-long event, and our bank accounts make it clear that we succeeded.  One of the gifts I received came to me in July, very near our actual anniversary date.  My wonderful wife gave me a camera upgrade!

Having shot nearly 20,000 images on my D50, I was absolutely elated when she told me to go get a shiny new D300.  I added a few accessories like the MB-D10 vertical grip, and a few high-speed CF cards and began shooting as soon as I had some juice in the batteries.

After the initial fun of trying all the buttons and features, such as Live-View, and setting the camera up by going through all the menus and selecting initial settings was over, I was very concerned that I might have wasted our money.

I couldn’t enjoy the new ability to shoot at ISO 800 with no perceptible noise.  I didn’t benefit from the blazing nine-frames-per-second frame rate.  The wonderful high-resolution three-inch LCD on the back of the camera simply mocked me.  You see, the first 400 or so images I shot on the D300 were absolutely terrible!  I felt like I knew nothing about photography whatsoever.

I was desperate, so I decided to buy Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300.  I read all 760-some-odd pages in two days.  Thom is the guy to read if you shoot Nikon.  He wrote that the D300 uses a different approach to balancing shutter speed, aperture, and ISO than the consumer cameras like the D50 when shot in Programmed Automatic (P) mode.

When shooting the D50, I had come to expect that the camera would change the aperture and ISO before adjusting the shutter speed.  This meant that shutter speed was preferred over these settings in P mode.  The D300 doesn’t work like that at all.  It assumes that you know what effect you are looking for in your photo and that therefore aperture should be preferred to preserve depth-of-field if at all possible.  Consequently, the D300 was preferring to shoot at much slower shutter speeds than my D50 would given the same light.  This resulted in most of my pictures falling victim to camera shake–I can’t hand-hold well at all.

So, a word to the wise.  Before you step up to a professional ( or “pro-sumer”) camera, be sure you are ready to shoot like a pro.  It took me a long time to learn to really prepare for a photograph before releasing the shutter.  I’ve learned to check the camera settings much more regularly than I ever did with the more forgiving D50.

Finally, I am making better images with the D300.  The pain was worth it because it made me a better photographer.