D700 vs D300. An ultimate choice to upgrade after D50

With new Canon EOS50D and the Ultimate 5D mark II in the market, a lot of people like to compare them with Nikon D300 and D700 respectively. Since I am a Nikon user, I do my best noy\t to switch system since its gonna cost me a bomb. Anyway I am looking forward to change a new camera though. My Nikon D50 is dying soon. Its time for me to retire it cos since 2005, I have taken more than 40,000 clicks. Although its not much compare to a professional usage, I got to say my camera starts to make that strange noise ever time I took a shot. Now the plan is December 2009. I got a choice of D300 or D700 (due to my range of lens). I am using those old lens and some of it cant be use with the lower range probably including the D90 and D5000. Anyway my budget is about 3k. So..... going thru the specs review in nikon.com.sg I got to say D700 is very tempting. But the only thing is that it uses FX format (full-frame). I can't afford its compatible lenses. Next I look at the D300 which are more popular ones. Like I say, I look at the specs and sees no diff among the two. Accept for the sensors. You can look at the specs here http://nikon.com.sg/compareproductitems.php?p=1257-63bae4a413,1187-59711d5d33

Anyway, D300 is much more cheaper and an ideal way to upgrade from my D50. Besides after that I can tell the missus to upgrade some more.hehehe

Open Source software that helps photographer

Getting started in photography is not simply just buy a camera and click away. Of course if you just want to do it for archiving fond memories will be just fine. When we buy a new digital camera, it is normal that the company brand give a free software that will help you in basic editing like framing, crop, resizing and simple tweaks of the images. But if you are really passionate in photography and are very progressive then the only thing that will hinder your progress is having very good advance software that can produce high quality post editing such as from leveling to cloning. This will set you back from a couple of hundreds to thousand of dollars. Softwares like Nik Sharpener, Noise Ninja, Aperture, Adobe Creative Suite, CaptureNX and other licensed plugins. Though this software are very very good, they can actually durnt your pockets. Myself too needed something cheap or free to enjoy this benefits to upgrade your photography skills. For me open sourced software is the way to go. I enjoy using most of this 'free' software as even to got all these professional benefit can really cos a 'bomb'. Though they are not as very good as the licensed software, they can still provide excellent result

Currently, most of my work is done by using this few inages.

• Gimp http://www.gimp.org (close to a photoshop)
• Resizer http://snapfiles.com (watermarks)
• Qtpsfigui http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/ (HDR)
• Nikon Transfer http://nikon.com.sg (image uploading)
• NikonView http://nikon.com.sg (image browser)
• Photo Filtre http://photofiltre.free.fr/ (another version similar to photoshop)

Check my images at sofimages blog at http://sofimages.blogspot.com or go to my stock portfolio at Istockphoto.com/rumblefis All my images here are using open sourced software. Of course once I have enough of capital, I will definitely upgrade.