Two New Things

Contrary to various philosophies of the camera manufacturers, your photography will not improve simply by buying a new camera, lens or flash. If your composition, exposure and subject matter sucked before, it will probably suck after whatever purchase you've made. Investment in the craft will push personal improvement far higher than throwing money at it. Even sucky equipment has the ability to make great photographs with a little patience and skill.

What I love about photography is that I keep learning new things about my camera years after I bought it. For instance, almost every new camera out there has ISO speeds of between 100-3200. These ISO speeds are often crappy past 1600 but the camera makers offer them anyway. Ken Rockwell pointed out along with some guy on Flickr that a D50 can do the same thing - sort of. By underexposing an image at ISO 1600 by one or two F-spots, you can work the image once you get it home with the S-curves etc in Photoshop to push or pull the sensor (like they used to push/pull film) to extend the ISO on the D50 from ISO 100-3200. There will be more noise in the image - but that would be true too in the new cameras that offer the ISO 3200 (or 6400+). Taking a 'free' version of noise reduction software like Neat Image would improve it further.

Should I ever find myself out in the field without a fast enough shutter speed, this is definitely an option to try.

Second thing I learned: you can set the D50 to PRE for the White Balance. Take a photo (like aiming it at a 18% grey card or something pure white (OR just aim it directly at your light source if it's not the sun) and from then on, your camera will use that white balance. Great for those lighting situations where you have no idea what kind of light it is and can't quite seem to get a 'balance'.

So now my D50 is now taking pictures just like it did before, but now I have no reason or goal to buy something new for the features my D50 already has.