So, I ran out yesterday and used my George Bush Memorial Stimulus Package to pick up a Nikon D60 then I went around shooting all sorts of random stuff to get a feel for the camera.

The lens is spectacular, very nearly a macro, it easily allowing me to focus in nice and close. The display is great and, clearly, I have a lot of learning to do because this is a huge step up in complexity from my old "bridge" camera. I had a ball shooting lots of stuff.

The problem came when I went to import the photos into my computer. First off, the provided software is t3h cr4p. Someone needs to tell these guys that it's 2008, the "Norton Commmander" style GUI is quite passe. The deal breaker, though is that it keeps complaining that it needs to download an update, even though the Nikon website says there is no update, and the program itself  fails when it tries to download the update.

So, no problem, I use a Mac, I'll just use iPhoto. No problem. Pictures get pulled in fine. I grab a photo I took of a dandelion, dropped it into photoshop and bumped up the saturation a bit. Set it as my desktop, nice nice, then I upload it to deviant art.

Except the Deviant Art version has had the saturation drained out of it. WTF?!? Completely boring. Repeat the process with a tulip. The version on Heinztrucking.com looks different from the version on Deviant Art.

Then I discovered that the images even render differently if I load the pages in Firefox instead of Safari!

Oy vey!

So, finally, I decide to print them out and, lo, instead of being the way I tweaked them on my own monitor, or printing them out desaturated, the way they appear on some websites, they came out hyper saturated. The tulip looks like Andy Warhol had it's way with it, the grass looks like it was done with crayolas.

Sigh.

I thought color profiles were supposed to deal with all this?

Well, the camera is still absolutely great, zero shutter lag, close focus, huge display, supports RAW. sooner or later I'll work this out. I'm having a lot of fun with the camera, and the high-speed operation let me get pictures I wouldn't have been able to take otherwise, for example:

Sensei Mike Gets Schooled.