katt wrote:
ended up with the nikon d3000 kit from amazon that i posted the link to above.
I think you'll be happy with the D3000, and the 18-55 lens is a good beginner lens. It'll take you from a mild wide-angle to a short telephoto. In 35mm terms, it's roughly a 28-70 equivalent, and the 28-70 was a pretty standard everyday lens in the 35mm world for years. The VR (vibration reduction) feature is nice - I have the 70-300VR lens and it really does help in low light situations.
The main weak point in the D3000 (and its predecessor the D40) was the lack of an in-camera focus motor. Since you're starting from scratch, that's less of an issue than for someone like me who had accumulated a bagful of lenses over the years, but it does limit your choices on additional lenses (especially non-Nikon). You have to be careful to get only lenses that have internal focus motors.
The kit seems to have pretty much everything you'll need to start with. The extra battery is nice - always have an extra battery with you - but I think you'll be surprised at the life you get out of the standard battery. My D300 takes a different battery (EN-EL3e), but I think the capacities are similar, and I get 700+ shots to a charge. However, since the D3000 lacks the top-panel LCD display that the D300 has, you're going to have to use the color display on the back more, so you may not get quite so many.
I suspect you're going to want more lenses as time goes on. What you get will depend on what sort of photography you wind up doing.
The 18-55 lens is an f3.5-5.6 which can be a bit limiting if you do a lot of pictures of, for example... bunnies. (How did I guess that?) The f-stop is a measure of how much light gets through the lens. The lower the number, the more light. The range on your lens means that the lens is f3.5 at its widest setting (18mm) and f5.6 at its longest setting (55mm) - a difference of two f-stops, or, put another way, the lens will gather only one fourth the amount of light at 55mm as at 18mm. That means that you will find yourself needing to use flash instead of available light for indoor shooting, more often than not.
So, my next-most favorite lens after the 18-135 (that's my everyday lens) is a 50mm f1.4. That can be a bit pricey, but you can find lots of 50mm f1.8 lenses for not too much on eBay, and that's only one stop smaller. An f1.4 lens is six stops faster than your zoom at 50mm, so that it lets in 64 times as much light - or, putting it another way, if the exposure on the zoom is f5.6 at 1/4sec (which is too slow to handhold), the exposure would be f1.4 at 1/250. That would be fast enough not just to handhold, but to freeze action. And, you also get much less depth of field (the range of focus from front-to-back) so you can have the bunny stand out from the background.
After that, you'll probably look at something longer (like a 70-300) or shorter (like a 12-24), depending on the kind of pictures you like to take.
So, take lots of pictures, and let's see 'em!
