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back when I first got my d70 all the settings were a bit overwhelming. 4 years of dslr photography later, we're all a lot more comfortable with the ins and out of in-camera options, the manuals are larger but more understandable, and nikon has finally figured out which settings were crazy defaults in the first place.

so, I'm not going to get into any of the details of setting up your d300 here - there are tons of good resources on the net about this. I will say, though, that you can now save your custom settings to the cf card, which is nice. see page 325 "Save/Load Settings" in the d300 manual for the details. if you're interested, my current settings are here. beware, though these are *my* settings and you may not like them - save your own before messing with these :)

I will say that I was initally really disappointed with the images from the d300 - they were absolutely consistently underexposed. and no, I don't mean in a standard dcraw "my images are too dark" kind of way - the camera-generated images were underexposed by around a full stop. my trouble seems to have been with the matrix meter - for the kind of images I shoot the matrix meter just doesn't seem to cut it. after moving to the center-weighted meter things were much improved. ymmv.