Dear all,
I had recently started on taking my clicks [again] after I bought myself a DSLR. I am not a pro, just an amateur who knows a just a basic [or even less] of photographies and takes his toll on whatever knowledge he had gained!! Once long time ago I had started a thread contributing to the beautiful pictures from Nepal for which there were numerous contributers and some of them even professionals. As of now I remember them as Bhanja, I_Nepali, Khaobadi, Aloneguy77 who had some love for this. I hope and think there are still number of us among our community who wants to learn and share the things or two about photography!
Here is to share the first one from my side!

Maverick exactly what juggy said. D40 and D80 are class apart. D80 is definitely worth extra bucks. Just few advantages that can be listed are

1. Although Megapixels are not really important it is nice to have 10 MPs that D80 provides.
2. Auto focus with both AF and AF-S lenses, D40 does with only AF-S lenses.
3. Vastly better Autofocus system (The reason enough to invest if you want to photograph dynamic objects).
4. Things like changing metering modes and Exposure compensation are far more usable and accesible. This is important for me as I take pictures of birds. Sometimes birds are there against very bright background like sky. The camera might end up metering for sky instead of bird, then you have to select proper metering mode and exposure compensation (overexpose or underexpose) to get the right exposure. With d40 this is not really usable.

So D80 does 3 main things better than D40, it meters better, auto focuses better and has more megapixels. In other words you will be able to choose Aperture and shutter speed lot more accurately than d40 with d80.

Well you dont need all those goodies D80 has to make great pictures. You can have D40, select low iso, use manual focus and meter manually to get pictures as good as D80, all you need is patience and skills. Camera is just a tool, a photographer is the one who makes pictures.

Weekend pic:
The dribbles!!

Juggy bro,
I like your picture and I must admit that u r really CREATIVE. I enjoy your pictures. However, personally I dont like pictures that are edited/ photoshoped (using borders, adding colours) or like that.....despite being wonderful pictures somehow somewhere your pictures remind me about artificial things. No no, I dont mean they are bad, THEY ARE EXCELLENT still they dont look natural (just because of colour effect and borders and other things).

For me pictures means that are lively as rolpa has uploaded. Those are truly natural pictures.

Just my two cents and u know, I know nothing about photography and its fact that Little Knowledge is dangerous thing....so better i stay quiet

I know amazing, I photoshop my pics!! But what I am doing now is to improve my skills in both side: photography and Graphical editing! Being in this gloomy country, I don't always have favorable conditions to take out the suitable colours I want giving me rather a blant pictures. I then need some color enhancing to bring up the color I like; it is just like wooing a woman before u feel the gloss on her face!!
Then again, I would love some effects which I can't give without using very very expensive lenses and lights setups!! So I use photoshop for now; But I will upload my pics without photoshop editing too. I have done so before: For eg. the first one is not photoshopped, Crescent over cross one is not either; and the looking back was only converted into BW and red filter was applied! I ll upload some more of my NON-Photoshopped pics on coming days!!
Here is one for you!!
NON Photoshopped!
Leiden City hall!

Please be aware, it is a long post.
@Amazing bro,I think photoshopping is an integral part of digital photography. In old days people had no luxery of photoshop so they had to use some very creative methods for post processing. All the photographers are faced with one serious limitation of the camera, the dynamic range. The Dynamic Range means the range of brightness in the view, starting from the brightest to the darkest part. For example if you want to take a picture of a mountain against the sky in a bright day you will invariably see that either the mountain looks too dark or the sky looks too bright in the picture. This is because the camera cannot capture all the range the human eye can see. Human eyes are rated to see 11 stops of dynamic range compared to 5 stops of camera. So photographers always have to make some adjustment to make photo look more natural.
 All the photolabs do standard kind of processing to the negative like how much saturation to add, colour balance and stuff like that. But the pros do it exactly the way and the amount they like. Ansel Adams, probably the most influential landscape photographer, has written 3 major books on photography called The Camera, The Negative, and The Print. The work flow of photography starts from the camera and the processing of negative and printing. Each of the process is equally important to produce a good photo.
  You can think Photoshop as a ditigal darkroom. Of course it is not easy to master it. For serious work , your screen needs to be calibrated so the photo appears exactly alike in the print as it did in the screen. Then there are issues like over saturation, too much hue, colour balance off and lots of stuff like that, which takes time to get used to.
  Lets come back to straight out of the camera picture that you mentioned. Every digital camera first captures light using its sensor. The raw data (generally 12 bits) from the sensor is then processed to more managable format like jpeg(8 bits). During the conversion process the camera automatically does the processing work like adding contrast, hue, saturation, image sharpening, brightness etc. So there is no such thing as non processed digital picture. But you can always have more control using DSLRs that let you store data captured by the sensor (12 bits format) as it is called RAW format. Later you can process the RAW file to add the effects the way you want the picture to appear. I always take photos in RAW format. For example this photo of a Japanese White eye was taken in RAW format and then, some contrast , saturation and white balance were adjusted. I generally do it to make the subject look the way looked when I saw it with naked eyes.
 

 

BTW I think Juggy is doing terrific job with photoshop and exposure too. He has his own unique style and I really like it. Framing is a personal choice.

Dividude bro, your lasting posting of the bird photo was simply amazing. It's really well taken.

Thanx divdude bro for ur kind words even I don't deserve em!
Rugged; but still on play!

Juggy bro divdude bro

Together always:  Mr Blue+Mrs Red (Random shot in Bremen- Germany)

तेरा साथ है तो मुझे क्या कमी है

Museum  (building) that itself looks like museum.. (why to visit inside)

Italy
There is nothing about this pic just I like the building...

(People have different reasons to capture photographs, I do it for fun and try to bring memories from travel so my snaps are not feast for the eyes heehe) just the reality check.....

The leaning tower of Pisa....(Foto herda ta majja aauchha hoina)

''Grass always looks greener from other side''
Real Pisa
(Both pics taken same day)

Last one for now

Paris....... Amazing's not so amazing view

Amazing broda, Same place different angle!!
Gloomy Romance!

Good Morning peeps!!

one more

next one

John Rock, NC

Looking Glass, NC