So I finally made my photography hobby investment 2 days ago and came home with a Nikon D60, 18-55mm VR zoom, and 55-200mm VR zoom, among other odds and ends...definitely still learning, but here are a few shots I took today...Though, does anyone know how to compress images for upload without sacrificing quality? The quality after uploading to photobucket has been diminished.

Set your resolution to 1-3 megs and fire away until you learn something about the art. A meg or two per shot is plenty of resolution for photobucket, and there is no need to compress a JPEG since it is already compressed. You have some good glass now so it should be easy to make good pictures. Airplane shots are very challenging, don't be surprised if most of your shots are duds until you get a feel for what it takes to do them well. A success ratio of one or two good to several dozen rejects is typical with airplanes. The shots above look crisp but flat because zoom lenses put everything in the focal plane, so there is no feeling of in depth in the subject. Things in the foreground are in the same focal plane as things in the background.

Thanks for the advice. Understandably so, the diamonds in the rough are few and far between for sure. Today was day 1 of starting the hobby, so of course, I have a long way to go before anything becomes remotely consistent. I have been reading up for sometime now about the abc's of photography, but obviously I have no practical experience.

However, I had a ton of fun shooting today, and am super excited to keep working at it! Shot about 170 pics of all sorts of things over the period of about an hour today. Today's mission, as it will be for awhile, was primarily about learning the camera, and not creating art.

An experiment in the macro setting...some detail loss, as the original res was about 2900 x 2000.

If you mean the fuzziness in the foreground and background, that is due to extent of the focal plane and it has nothing to do with resolution. It is more like the way the eye actually sees things, by refocusing on each object as the center of vision moves. This goes on up to about 20 feet or so, then everything is in focus at infinity and the focal plane is infinite. I like to turn the autofocus off and use the manual feature. As good as AFs are, they do not always find what you were interested in when you are close to the camera. Detail loss is not going to be observable until you expand the size of the image beyond its native resolution, especially if it was reduced to a smaller size first. You can go down in resolution, but you can't go up without loss. When you redcue the size of an image like you did here, there is no observable detail loss because the image is smaller. It won't show up until you try and expand the print.

is this phx?

1024x768 at say 300 dpi is all that is needed for the web. Actually a bit of overkill with dpi but will reproduce on most monitors quite well. 72 dpi is standard for web images.