Tidal Basin Blossoms- Nikon D5600 Test Run

Photography Mar 24, 2024

Photos

The best found below. Talk about route and lenses and gear and stuff further.

Summary

Started out very windy and very grey outside. Good for getting to know the new camera and feeling out the lenses, bad for colorful blossom snaps.

I started at Foggy Bottom metrorail station, scooter'd down past the Lincoln and West Potomac Park, stopping a few times along the way, then parked just across from the George Mason Memorial then walked clockwise towards the MLK memorial along the Tidal Basin. Here, have a mspaint rendition of the route:

By the time I'd made it roughly halfway to the MLK memorial, the sun had started to break through, which afforded me some light to play with. Sadly, by the time I started to turn around to retrace as the sun set, my camera completely ran outta juice and I didn't bring a spare battery for some reason. Ope.

Gear

In advance of summer trips to come, I purchased a digital SLR- I've not had one before, somehow, ever- all film, smaller compacts, olympus pen type stuff, or increasingly my iPhone 14 Pro Max.

I got a Nikon D5600, which has been fantastic so far.
It came with a nice little kit lens, I had another interesting lens hanging around from some estate sale purchases I'd made, and I bought a f/1.8 prime for portraits and night shooting- I wanted something fast.

Here, have some links. Ken Rockwell is a great catalog-keeper of Nikon stuff, so I'll leave the prose to him:

Nikon 18-55mm VR AF-P

This is the lens that came with the camera. Pleasantly shocked at what I can push it to do in spite of it being "cheap".

Nikon 28-85mm AF

The AF doesn't work, but metering does. It's heavy, it's a little aged, has some serious distortion and clarity issues as you zoom, but it also has a really nice warmness to it. I think I would like to use this for some long exposures since it's a little soft as it is.