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I had to test the Christmas present yet again. Lord knows I’d be all over this thing if it didn’t have to go right back in the box after testing. The anticipation is killing me. I’ve abstained from reading the manual, too – all the photos are lens work with whatever adjustments I could figure out on my own – so far, just shutter speed. The AF-D lenses have adjustable aperture rings on the lens itself, which I infinitely prefer but as I mentioned before, those AF-D lenses were a one-off production piece and no one seems to make it like that for these SLRs.

The phots are from the AF-S lens we just picked up to go with the kit. Lisa was very much against trying to teach people how to manually focus. It’s this lens right here. I’m a huge fan of Mr. Rockwell’s work, so what he suggests, I listen dutifully. In fact, it was based on his opinion that we picked up the D40 in the first place.

Denby (or Nennee as we’ve taken to calling him now) was sitting perfectly still so I could take pictures – an absolute rarity.

44mm, F/5.3, 1/400 sec, ISO 200

20mm, F/3.8, 1/400 sec, ISO 200

24mm, F/4.2, 1/400 sec, ISO 200

I couldn’t control the aperture or the ISO, so it was largely upon me to finagle the depth of focus (DOF) out of the camera to my liking. If it isn’t abundantly clear, my goal for the first photo was to capture his steely eyed glare (check!), the second was to capture just his face, and the third was to capture him. I came away quite impressed.

Because I couldn’t control the aperture, I didn’t feel (at the time) that I should bother checking the lens outside of the half stops (worked great! I think). I’m kicking myself now for not trying without flash and adjusting the shutter speed accordingly to see how well the VR stabilization works (though, in fairness, I couldn’t figure out the ISO, so the photos probably would’ve been too dark).

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that today is the sixth anniversary of the blog. Thank you for reading/voting/commenting over the years!

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