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Last weekend I took a trip to Duxford Imperial War Museum, about 45 minutes away up the M11. I’d often passed it and have always said to myself that I really must visit the place sometime as they have a Concorde and my favourite plane, the SR71 Blackbird. Although the weather hasn’t been great I took a chance and grabbed my Nikon D40x.

The entry fee was £14.95 and is well worth it as there’s a huge selection of aircraft on display and some really nice educational displays, some of which are interactive for the kids.

But enough about Duxford, what about the Nikon?

Due to its light weight and relatively compact size carrying it around all day is no inconvenience.
This is only my second outing with the camera (shame on me!) so I’m still getting used to the menus and settings. The D40x does make it easy for you though, the rear screen shows all your current settings and there’s even a built-in help function that explains each setting, just press the “?” button. I mostly use the camera in program “p” mode which means the camera sets the shutter speed and aperture. I normally override the manual white balance so I have set my shortcut key to this and simply hold that down while using the thumb scroll wheel to change the setting. I also make a lot of use of the exposure compensation which is easy to set, just hold the button in with your fore finger and use the scroll wheel under your thumb. I am starting to experiment with the “A” mode which is for aperture priority to try to get some nice shallow depth of field shots (blurred backgrounds) but the lack of a depth of field preview option makes it a bit hit and miss due to my lack of experience.
I make a lot of use of the exposure compensation due to the cameras metering system which seems to be a bit random at times, specifically in difficult conditions such as taking a photo of a plane in shadow, indoors, with bright light streaming through the windows. The sky would blow out to ensure you stood a chance of seeing the plane rather than a shadow which is of course the ideal option for an amateur snapper but I prefer to preserve the sky and bring out the shadows in Photoshop.
The camera does a good job of raising the ISO automatically in dark conditions if you deny it the use of the flash and the amount of noise at even ISO 1600 is very small and is a big reason for having a digital SLR over a compact camera. I tend to take a lot of shots in low light and while my Casio compact is very good, the Nikon is way ahead of it. A faster lens (bigger aperture) instead of the kit lens would improve things even further though.

My next purchase will probably be the Nikon SB400 flash so I can take better indoor photos by making use of bounce flash instead of the harsh built-in unit.

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