My new camera is finally here. I spent a bunch of time running around yesterday shooting things to play with the camera. Short thoughts:

- The camera's GUI is extremely powerful. Somebody who doesn't know a lot about both photography and color management is going to be snowed if they try to really wrap their brain around this camera. The GUI is tuned to the professional, not the amateur. That's great for me, but I can see a lot of Nikon's customers getting very, very confused.

- The SB-800 flash is amazing. I put my camera in "commander" mode and hand-held the flash to the side. WIthout trying too hard, I was able to shoot this:



I did the raw conversion using Adobe Camera Raw, which gives much better control than Nikon's free software (I don't know if I want to spend $100 of the fancy software). I used the eyedropper on the label to say "this is white" and it made some subtle corrections. The default Nikon conversion had the label looking blue-ish.

- The Nikon software sucks. I always thought, by looking at the various reviews, that Nikon was doing much better than Canon. Boy was I confused. It's certainly prettier than Canon software, but it just fails at letting me do my workflow my way. The one Canon ZoomBrowser feature that I liked, and which Nikon cannot reproduce: I want to be able to import any "new" pictures from my card and drop them into folders that are dated according to the shooting date, not the import date. Nikon's software doesn't seem to know how to do it. Now, there are plenty of EXIF tools out there, but they're all about JPEG or TIFF. I doubt they'll be able to comprehend Nikon NEF files.