Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

December 7, 2006

going digital

Filed under: Photography — cec @ 12:10 pm

Okay, I’m taking the plunge. A Nikon D80 with 18-135mm lens and 8 GB worth of SDHC cards arrived on my doorstep yesterday. The D80 body was a Christmas present from K’s parents! I used extra birthday money to get the memory and the lens kit.

I’ve got a number of reasons for going digital.  There’s finally enough resolution in an affordable camera. The D80 is a 10.2 megapixel camera. That’s about 1/2 as much as I can pull off of a slide using a 4k dpi scanner, but about twice what I usually do scan – good compromise. The SLR body will use (almost) all of my current lenses. I tend to take more nature photography images than other types, the D80 gives you a 1.5X increase in focal length as compared to my film cameras. Last night I tested it with a doubler and a 300mm lens. That took me out to 600mm of glass, plus the 1.5X factor – 900mm equivalent in something I can hike with! The ISO adjustment means that even the 2 f-stop loss of light from using the doubler is manageable.

Initial impressions – wow! Beautiful, large, sharp, vivid images. Light weight camera. VERY responsive. Nice ability to bracket shots. Great control over the color balance. One gripe, my SB-28 flash will not work in TTL mode, only automatic and manual (as an aside, TTL as an acronym is too overloaded: through the lens, transistor-transistor logic, time to live, etc.).

I’ll still bring my F5 and some film with me to Yellowstone next year. Just not as much film and probably only Velvia 50 for landscape shots.

1 Comment

  1. well??? Where the heck are the pictures???

    Comment by Bryn — December 8, 2006 @ 3:00 pm

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