Hello from Canada

[Charandane]

Well Gary, I decided to take you up on your kind offer and joined your forum. Your comments on the DPR forum were so genuine that I felt I should come and spend a little time here. Even though I have not as yet purchased the D70, I will probably do so in the next little while. I will spend some time as we say "lurking" here in the interim. I've been an avid amateur photographer for the past 40 years or so and have owned and still own many Nikon cameras. I currently own the F, FM, FE2, F601, F90X, Coolpix 990 and 5700, although I must admit I have not really used any of the film SLR's in over 4 years. I also own a plethora of gear far too numerous to list, again all of it Nikon.

It is 2:30 AM here on Wednesday, so I'd better get some sleep.

[Glen]

Welcome Andy

[MHD]

So where in Canada... Only been to Vancouver... Awesome city!

I had the 5400 before the move to the D70.... Believe you me you will not look back!!

[Greg B]

Welcome to D70Users.

Get that D70, happiness follows.

[Charandane]

Thanks for the welcome everyone.

I've waited a long time to finally make a decision on a DSLR. Based on all the research I've done and the comments from owners, I think it will fit my stable handsomely.

Ottawa is the nation's capital and is located in the East of Canada between Toronto and Montreal. We actually live in a rural area called Woodlawn but legally it's considered to be part of Ottawa. We live on a ranch and have and breed Great Dane dogs and Tennessee Walking Horses.

I look forward to participating in these forums.

[gstark]

Andy,

Welcome; glad you could join us.

I know what you mean about having all the 35mm sitting around for four years and doing mostly nothing; in my case it's probably been sitting around closer to 10 years, except that Leigh's been using some of it more recently for his art scholl studies.

I've been tghrough a plethora of digital gear as well, and the D70 is the first digicam that satisfies my needs; each of the others was deficient in many ways, and I suspect you'll appreciate this from your own experiences.

I think the bottom line is that the SLR, whether film or digital, permits the greatest amount of flexibility and creative input, and once you've experienced and enjoyed that, it's tough to settle for less.

Now, where's some pix of those beautiful Great Danes?

And which are bigger? The Danes, or the horses?

[Charandane]

Andy,

Welcome; glad you could join us.

Thanks for the welcome Gary. A lot has transpired since my last post. I've actually gone to our local photo store and traded in a lot of that unused Nikon stuff on a D70, an SB800, the 18-70 kit lens, two batteries and a 1GB Lexar card. In fact the battery is charging as I write this. I think I did very well price wise since I got over $2000. for the stuff that was collecting dust. This made the purchase and shelling out for the new gear almost pallatable.

I guess I'm going to be busy the next little while figuring all this new gear out.

The horses are slightly bigger than the Danes.

Sorry, I've not quite figured out the process here yet, however, if you tell me how to embed images here, I will be pleased to post a few. My photos are hosted on pbase so that might help in the procedure.

I'm going to read a lot of the materials here to help me set up the D70, I hope I can count on the folks here for some much needed input.

[gstark]

Andy,

Congratulations on the purchases. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I suspect that you will. It sounds as if you got a fairly good deal. The only piece of equipment that you bought that you might find to be redundant is the battery - battery life on the D70 is a bit like a cockroach: it just keeps on running, no matter how you try to kill it.

I'd probably get a second CF card as soon as possible, and a card reader as well. The card reader just makes things so much easier when you need to move images from the CF to the PC, and if your PC has USB2 and your card reader is also USB2, it all happens so much more quickly as well.

For posting of images, as you've probably surmised, I don't have the bandwidth here to handle the traffic that I suspect that would generate. If you just include a direct link to the actual image url on pBase, I think you'll be fine.

[Charandane]

Gary,

I know I will enjoy this outfit, I already am. Having had a number of Coolpix cameras that were notorious for devouring batteries, I automatically got two batteries. I already have many CF cards as well as a card reader.

I'll attempt to link to a few of my horse and dog images, hope it works.



http://www.pbase.com/charandane/horsesdogs&page=all

Our young female "Chyna" was Canada's top female last year and one of the images shows her winning the National Specialty. We recently bred her to this year's winner. We are crossing our fingers, toes etc...

Back to the Users Manuals.

[Glen]

Andy,

It looks a little cold in your neck of the woods

Great shots.

[gstark]

Andy,

I've taken the liberty of editing your message to embed a direct link in there to one of the photos that's referenced from your original link. Please feel free to re-edit the message as you wish, but hopefully you'll be able to see what I've done and if you wish, you'll be able to use that as a reference point to emulate.

Lovely animals all. Dare I ask the source of the Italian influence in some of the naming that I'm seeing here?

Where I live I can't have a dog, and I really miss that. I'm a labrador person, but I'm partial to just about anything with a tail that wags.

[MHD]

Ditto... Retrievers though here...

[gstark]

Ditto... Retrievers though here...

I'm reminded of some very, very good times ... Woodstock's (my lab) best friend was Mr Tubby (a beautiful golden retriever), whose owners lived but a few blocks away.

Mr Tubby knew my car very well, and whenever we arrived at his house, he was there, smiling, ready to jump up into the car and start playing with Woodstock.

Wait for us to get out and out of the way ? Why bother with little formalities like that; they had important bones and stuff to find!

It's been maybe 14 years since Woodstock went to that great river in the sky, but I still miss him.

[Charandane]

Yes guys, it does get cold here but as of now it's still beautiful. Yesterday we golfed and it was 19 C. In the winter though it gets down to -35 C on some days.

Dogs are absolutely fantastic and they all have their unique personalities. In fact I vividly recall hte personalities specific dogs from as far back as 30 years ago.

Gary, I'm not sure how you linked that specific url, but I'll give it a go:

http://image.pbase.com/u45/charandane/m ... fyBISS.jpg

Nope...I can't get a photo to appear here. How did you do that or is it only you who can link a picture directly into the message???

[Glen]

Andy, when writing your message look above the box and you will see buttons. The one second from the right with "img" on it is the one to insert an image. Press it once, insert url, press again to close. Voila, picture in text

[gstark]

Andy,

As Glen suggests, the link needs to be enclosed within a set of IMG tags.

[Onyx]

Andy, I noticed you quoted temperature in celcius. Is that because Canadians use this sensible unit of temperature measurement, or is it merely because you were smart enough to convert from farenheit (a concept which evidently those south of your border cannot grasp)?

[Charandane]

Well guys, it must be late at night but I can't make an image appear, yet I think I'm doing exactly what Glen said to do. I've tried it both the way it's done on DPR as well as by copying the actual url but all I get is this:



or this:



What's the trick to get it to appear?

[gstark]

99% there, Andy.

Add a .jpg extension to the referenced URL, and see where that gets you.

[Charandane]

Hello Onyx,

We frozen Canadians actually use the Celsius scale and have since about 1967 I believe. It took a bit of getting used to but now it's second nature.

Let's try this embedding once more per Gary's last post.



BINGO! EUREKA!

This is the guy (the one with four legs and spots) that we just bred our female to.

Glad I finally figured this out. You folks down-under must have thought you were really blessed with this Canuck dolt. Mind you, I'm trying to read the SB800 and D70 Instruction Manuals concurrently. That does excuse the dim-wittedness I trust.

[gstark]

Mind you, I'm trying to read the SB800 and D70 Instruction Manuals concurrently.

There's a mind-numbing exercise if ever I saw one.

I would have thought it prudent to save that sort of task for when the weather got realy cold. You could then go outside, lie in the hammock, and read both manuals concurrently.

Then again, Halloween's just around the corner!