Kevin's Weblog

A couple days before our current trip back to LA, I picked up one of these:

I’d been eyeing the D70s for a while, somewhat grudgingly. I’ve got enough Nikon lenses that it would be quite expensive to switch, although Canon clearly had the lead in bodies. So, I was quite happy when the D80 appeared, putting Nikon back on more-or-less equal footing.

One of the first things I realized was that this camera is much more complicated than either my old N60 film camera or any of the point-and-shoot digitals I’ve had. Fortunately, it’s possible to ignore a lot of that if you want, but sometime soon I’ll want to sit down with the manual and figure out what all the buttons and menus do, and experiment with different settings.

I’m also probably going to need to buy a real wide-angle lens. With the film camera, I’ve usually been happy with the low end of my 28-80mm zoom, but the smaller sensor on the digital makes that effectively 42-120mm, which doesn’t really suffice to take many pictures inside. Unfortunately, it looks like it’ll be somewhat expensive to address this, since you need what was traditionally an ultra-wide lens in order to get normal wide-angle on a digital camera. But, at least I can console myself with the fact that my $500 70-300mm lens just turned into what would have been a $5000 lens before.

So far I have not actually taken many interesting pictures with the camera, having been stuck in mostly boring parts of LA. But, I expect to do more on the drive back to Oregon, so I should be posting some of the products before long.