I’m just back from a great trip with my friends Will & Lawrence to Yellowstone and southern Montana. Due to scheduling issues we almost missed the winter season but got there just in time for some good snow scenes and plenty of animals along the roads…

Nikon has just rolled out a very useful firmware update for most of their Pro D-SLR line (except the D3S which presumably already has these improvemnts). The new firmware includes support for CF cards up to 64GB, improved Auto White Balance, some focus options and my favorite which sets the time from a GPS clock. You can download it from the Nikon USA site. For more details... Read more »

More and more birders are becoming interested in photography. To go beyond the limitations of digiscoping (limited low light capability, tricky auto-focus, limited panning or ability to capture action, etc.) requires a fairly serious investment in a camera body and lenses. In this section of our exclusive GearGuide we'll cover tips for what to look for in a camera body...

Contributed by Paul Janosi

[EDITORS  Note: Correct exposure has become nearly a religious issue with the advent of the "expose to the right" mantra for many raw shooters. But not everyone sees exposure the same way. Thanks to newsletter reader Paul Janosi for contributing this article with his thoughts on tuning exposure on your high-end D-SLR and even more importantly his meticulous technique for fine tuning your AF system for use with your long lenses and Teleconverters. I tried it with my 200-400f/4 and my TC-14E (both of which had just been serviced and aligned by Nikon) and found that indeed a correction to AF improved the sharpness of my images noticeably--David]   Read more »

Welcome to DPS 7-06. We hope your summer has been a succesful one, both photographically and personally. The highlight of ours was once again our Grizzly Bear & Puffin photo safaris where we lead two great groups of enthusiastic participants in photographing the majestic Alaskan Coastal Brown Bears and a variety of seabirds. In the meantime Nikon has been busy churning out a spate of new Coolpix models but has also update the D300 and several important lenses we want to make sure you know about. And of course in this issue we'll give you the latest updates on our events schedule.