SLR Nikon D50 Blog |

The battery’s pretty charged, but I’m gonna go shoot a bunch of pictures and I only have one battery and I don’t want it to die so that I’m stuck. Thanks! Oh, and only answer if you know please, I don’t want to ruin anything.

Years ago when the first nickel cadmium (nicad) batteries came onto the market they had a serious problem called "memory". If you tried to top them up before they were fully discharged they would no longer take a full charge. so the advice given at the time was to never top up a battery.

Today life is a lot different. First of all the nicad problem was solved in the nicads but it was imperfectly solved and ther was never a strong campaign to tell the world it was no longer an issue. So the myth today survives.

The next major leap in technology was the nickel metal hydride battery. This technology is what’s most common today for regular rechargeable batteries like the AA sizes. This technology has never had a memory problem, it can be topped up as often as you like.

Finally came the lithium ion battery which is what’s used in your Nikon and in laptops and many other battery powered devices. This battery is the same, it can be topped up as often as you like. And it’s a good idea to do so. They don’t charge as fast as the nickel metal hydride batteries so you will find you can’t really top it up quickly just before you go out somewhere. What’s also nice about these batteries is that they don’t lose charge like the older battery technologies. A lithium ion battery will slowly discharge when it’s not used, but that discharge is measured in months, not days or weeks. So once charged, it holds its charge very well.

I use a Nikon D200 and I have three batteries for it, two in the power supply grip and a spare in my camera bag. Any time I finish a shoot I make it a point to recharge the batteries I have on the camera to ensure the camera is always ready for the next shoot. My spare I recharge every month just to make sure it stays topped up at all times. This way any time I pick up the camera I know it will function perfectly for me.

Since you have only one battery at the moment, that’s what I’d recommend, charge the battery when you’re finished taking pictures so that the camera is ready for the next time you need it. That said, it’s also usually a good idea to have a spare battery in your kit just in case. For normal picture taking it’s probably not an issue, but if you start to use the flash and/or the LCD a lot or you do pictures in cold weather, you’ll find that your power capacity runs down very fast. It’s rough when you’re in the middle of an event and you run out of power.

I hope this helps a little.

I have recently bought a Nikon D50 with a couple of lenses (18-55) (55-200). I wanted to know which other lenses are compatible with the camera and what to look out for when buying.

Sigma: http://www.sigmaphoto.com/

Tamron: http://www.tamron.com/

Tokina: http://www.thkphoto.com/

Iam interested in seeing the full kit and other attacheable accessories.

This may not be the full kit, but one way to approach the question is to browse the images that come up in an image search:
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?ei=UTF-8&p=rebel%20xt
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=nikon+d50&ei=UTF-8&x=wrt
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=nikon+d70&ei=UTF-8&x=wrt

I just bought a used Nikon D50 and the screen has some scratches. Nothing major, just some light scratching that might be buffed out.

It has a glass protective plate over the LCD. Elvis is right, since you are not using the LCD to make critical adjustments, it really does not matter.

I have lost my software computer disk to load the system on my PC for my Nikon D50 camera

try this..

I’m basically trying to find out the specific purposes of different types of lenses.

Remembering that the D50 has a 1.5x lens factor, I’d say that a 60 mm lens is good for head shots. It lets you get back from your subject a bit and it will give that "classic" portrait look you would get from using an 85 mm lens on a 35 mm film camera. 105 mm (35 mm equiv.) is a great portrait lens, also.

If you are looking for a lens to start out with, consider the Nikkor AF-S 18-70 f/3.5-4.5G ED DX lens. This will take you from the 35 mm equivalent of 27-105, so you will be able to try out a lot of focal lengths in the "portait" range. If you really settle in on one, you can go buy it as a prime lens for better optical quality. Personally, I have the Nikkor 60 mm f/2.8 macro lens (aka "micro") and it is an excellent lens for macro AND head shots, but it is a $400 lens.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/1870.htm

Here’s the advantages of the D50 (and digital SLR cameras in general):
* It’s vastly more responsive than digital compact cameras. With compact cameras, the autofocus takes forever, you have annoying shutter lag, you even have lag due to the electronic viewfinder. With the D50 everything is much faster. With action shots (even with kids and pets) that means you get more keepers.
* Bigger viewfinder. I know it sounds trivial, but I like to see details when I look through a viewfinder – not just check the composition.
* Better low light performance. dSLR cameras keep working without the flash during dusk and indoors. You can crank the ISO up to 1600 and still get great image quality. If you add a dedecated low light lens, like the 50mm f/1.4, you can even do street photography at night. (I do with my Nikon D200.)
* More control over depth of field. With the D50, you can take a picture of someone and deliberately blow the background out of focus. With compact cameras pretty much everything is always in focus, wich makes pictures look flat.
* Extra features. The D50 lets you take more control than than the usual ’scene modes’. That’s if you want to, of course. You can also just leave it on fully automatic.
* Incredible choice of lenses. With a compact camera, you have 5x or 10x zoom, and that’s it. I used to have a camera with 10x zoom myself, but indoors I was constantly backing up into walls. With my dSLR, I can slap on a super wide angle lens and make my tiolet look like a ball room. Or I can use a macro lens or a 600mm tele lens, or a low light lens, or whatever lens the job requires.
The down sides are that the D50 costs more (you can get started for around $800, but extra lenses cost $150 and up… way up) and if you do collect a lot of gear, you’ll end up dragging it all around in a heavy camera bag.

I have a NikonD50 and i’m looking to get a nice speed light flash for it, any suggestions?

I have a D50 with an SB600 and really like it. If I had the budget I would get the SB800 but you’d really need a D70 or better to make use of the added features. I just finished a photo class and the instructor highly recommended getting a Nikon/Canon brand flash over a third part unit and he wasn’t a name brand only guy.

The SB600 has made using a flash a lot easier than the old days. I can now use fill flash without worrying so much about blowing out the image.

Nikon D50 & SpeedLite SB-600. – 1/2

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How to take an HDR photo set (3 photos each with different exposures) using a Nikon D50 digital SLR camera. Includes a walkthrough of the settings you should use to take the photo. Learn more at www.visualphotoguide.com

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