D50 w/o DOF...work around?

Hi all,
The D50 fits my skill level, budget, and hands pretty well, and I am all
set to spend some $ - but I as I am interested in photography as art, I
suspect I might miss the DOF preview. So, what are my work around
options, other then the D70s? Does the LCD help? Can I buy a primary
lens with an aperture ring and stop-down myself? or ??

Thanks,
Tom

 

Set the aperture, take a test photo and then view it to see it you have
too much, too little or the right amount of DOF. The preview gets
pretty dark with higher f-numbers anyway.

Scott

 

I seldom use mine on a D70, as mentioned it gets dark so hard to see
anyways.

The LCD is good for evaluating the look and size of out of focus circles
in the background but not so good for evaluating sharpness on a D70 it
doesn't go to full zoom.

No this won't work. Only very ancient lenses work that way & those would
need some kind of adapter and wouldn't meter. Modern lenses only stop
down at the moment of taking the exposure and a microchip is needed to
tell the camera what the range of the aperture is for calculating metering.

If you have the luxury of tethering a laptop to the camera with Nikon's
$100 Capture software, that's an extraordinary way to see how your
images are coming out. I have an old tripod and I put some brackets on
it for holding a laptop, mostly for doing time lapse movies but it's
really amazing how much more you can see of the image full size. You can
control all the camera's settings from the computer, experimenting for
just the right effect. If nothing else this is a great way to learn.

 

(Top quoting :-O) ... Thanks both for your information...I'll take DOF
preview off my "Please-NO-regrets" list and I like the notion of using
the "laptop-viewfinder" for learning and near real time tweaking.

- Tom

Yep, that was my guess, having read enough to suspect, but without
experience to know what I might be missing.