I am a beginner in this sense: I just acquired a used but pristine D90...thus I am trying my hardest to move my brain into the digital age. My prior experience was in the 80's with a Mamiya Sekor 500 tl. Since then, family and work moved photography waaaaay down the list of priorities.
I describe the D90 as a computer that takes pictures....and like my experiences with computers...they are not intuitive to my way of thinking. But, as I suggest, I am willing and eager to learn/move the process ahead.
My initial goal is simple: take a picture to then determine if the shutter count on this camera is as low as I believe. As is typical with my approach, I now know just enough to be dangerous. I have learned that the firmware is not the most current and I have a guide that will allow me to do some camera presets...thus it seems that before doing any presets I should load the most current firmware first. My wife has an SD card reader but it doesn't match the size of my SD card, so then I looked into just simply connecting the camera to my Mac (and perhaps updating the firmware that way). Then I learned that to do that I needed the NIKON CD to be installed first. Apparently that CD wasn't among the items I picked up as part of the recent purchase. I wasn't looking for it (I know I should have) because I believed that using Photoshop or some equivalent would allow me to skip the NIKON CD piece.
Anyway...not much progress updating the firmware yet. That's where my first issue is. I have downloaded the updates from the NIKON site onto my Mac computer but I don't know how to load that information onto the camera. Should I buy the right card reader? Buy Photoshop, etc? What steps would you take given my "ability" to go around in circles when it comes to technology? Thanks!!!
Dave