New camera - getting excited!

Just unpacked my new camera - Nikon D90 with Nikkor 18-200 VR lens and getting quite excited - and I can hardly wait for the battery to charge!

It's been quite a few years since I did any serious photography and for the last few years have been using a little Nikon 4300 jobby. But it's limitations have finally proved too much and I'm really missing the functionality of my old Minolta 35mm with all it's lenses and filters. (But I don't miss the hours in the darkroom.)

So, with new camera, still fantastic iMac and with Photoshop Elements on it's way, I'm really looking forward to rekindling my old hobby. Hopefully, it won't be too long before have something worthy to post here. Wish me luck.

Glad to hear it!

If you were fooling around in the darkroom, I am assuming that you are quality oriented.
Elements is fine, but I think it would be in your best interest to at least demo Nikon's software.(NX2) This is especially true if you intend to shoot RAW.
In my opinion, Nikon's software just does a better job on highlights/shadows and sharpening.

Looking forward to seeing your work.

Jimmy

Enjoy the new camera, you'll have a lot of fun with it! One of my coworkers just got herself a D60 and is totally amazed at the quality difference between her old P&S and the new SLR (although she's not quite used to the nikon reds )

I have that lens on my D300 as my "walk around" lens - it's not the most perfect lens at it's extremes (18mm and 200mm) but for general shooting, it's a decent lens. Plus it saves me from lugging around my heavy glass if I'm just out taking general snaps.

I myself have never been really taken with elements (for that matter, I've not been fond of nx either, but I haven't tried it on my Mac - when I was using windows I always felt it was sluggish for me, but a lot of people really love it, and it does offer a lot of power). I usually now use a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop CS; although with my move to Mac, I haven't replaced my photoshop yet and am just using lightroom for the time being.

If you find yourself really getting into photography again, look at either Apple aperture or Adobe lightroom - they are both really nice products for cataloging and doing basic adjustments to your photos (crop, rotate, color balance/change, lens flare, some noise reduction (although LR's noise reduction algorithm isn't the best (which is shocking since Adobe bought out the company that made the Rawshooter product and their image handling for noise and several other corrections were incredible), etc.) and (although I don't know about aperture) a lot of printing features as well as web export features.

Well, I've babbled enough now Enjoy the new camera, I'm sure you'll be thrilled with it!