Nikon D40 camera, good use for nature photography?

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The D40 can take wonderful nature pictures. With good lighting and a long lens (perhaps a 70-300mm zoom lens) you can take great critter pictures. With a long lens, it's best to use a tripod. The trick to nature shots is patience. You need to be still and can end up sitting around for 30 minutes as the critters come nearer to you. You also need to choose the right time to shoot so the lighting is right. Don't forget bugs. Moths and butterflies are wonderful subjects.

Be aware of the D40's lens limitations. If you want full automatic exposure and focusing, you can only use certain types of lenses. Otherwise, you can use older lenses if you don't mind manually adjusting things.

The D40 has a hidden plus. Since it's 6 megapixels, the sensor pixels are fairly large which gives this camera nice dynamic range and sensitivity at ISO 200.

http://picasaweb.google.com/qrkpub/BeachBirds is some shots of shore birds that I recently took with a 500mm catadioptric lens on my D40 and a home made monopod. Everything is manual control using this lens. Catadioptric lenses are a poor mans telephoto lens. The out of focus areas are annoying since out of focus objects come out as donuts.

If you find that you enjoy doing this sort of shooting, take a photography class or borrow some books on photography at your local library. Learning how to work with your tools gives you better control at creating interesting art.

Btw, any of the APS-C sensor sized dSLR cameras, like the ones offered by Canon or Nikon, will do a great job.

Both these cameras will make great images for you and you CAN use both of these cameras as a photography student, the D40 is a SLR thou, and has much more possibilities then the P90 which is a point and shoot camera... The D90 (not P90) is a more advanced SLR it's the best consumer level camera Nikon has at the moment...

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yes, with a wide angle lens