The common brickfilmer uses quickcam pro 9000, which is excellent - using a manual focus lense, although it is a webcam and therefore you need to be connected to a computer to take photos. With the quickcam pro and a good frame capture program (monkeyjam), brickfilm will be effective and easy. (i use it, its amazing and only £79.99)
Your nikon d5000 is an expensive camera, i dunno about cameras that much, but i think you should disable any automatic functions, like auto focus or something. But, yeah it should be good.
Hope these words helped in some random but lego related way.
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