Nikon D70
Wouldn’t you know it, just as I am starting to get a handle on my new Treo 600, my wife goes and buys me a new digital camera! Well, part of one anyway. It's the Nikon D70, and I've been lusting after it for a while now! I’ve previously rambled on about my experiences with photography in general and digital in particular. This will be my fifth digital camera, which is hard to believe, since I got my first one only four years ago. I guess I've averaged a new one once a year! My last digital, the Canon S50, was bought with the hopes of pushing me to take more photographs, since it is a good deal smaller than the previous cameras I had and so more portable. I think it did help me take more, but not significantly more. I will probably hold onto the S50 as something that I can just throw in my pocket when I don't want to lug a big camera bag and an expensive camera and lens. All my other digital cameras I ended up selling to friends in order to buy the next one, but this one, which is the most expensive one yet, I am getting without that benefit - although as I said my wife is helping me out.
I’m always amazed at my wife’s photographs, which she’s taken primarily on SLR’s – first a 35mm film Nikon F1, and more recently on a digital Fuji S2. Most of this is due to her skill at capturing things at the right moment, framing shots perfectly, and doing all the technical meatering stuff that I’m still too lazy to do. But also, part of it is the lenses she uses, which give her much wider leeway in terms of zooming and especially depth of field than are possible with the S50’s small lens.
In the last year or so there have been a lot more prosumer digicams coming on the market with longer lenses that have at least much more powerful optical zooms, but most of these are almost as expensive if not more so than the D70's body (lenses of course can mutilply it's price by leaps and bounds), and the lower priced ones simply don't have half the control and functionality of the D70. When the Canon Rebel digital SLR came out last year and was the first digital SLR for under $1,000, I started salivating! Here was a camera within reach, at least theoretically, but an actual SLR. Reading the reviews, I was a bit disappointed. It seemed that Cannon had intentionally crippled the camera’s capabilities by simply turning off certain functionality that was available. This was done for marketing reasons as their higher-priced pro DSLR, the 10D, would have been outclassed at least in a lot of ways, and the 10D is a lot more expensive. Even some of the functionality that I’d had my small S50 would not be available on this SLR. So, I used that as a good excuse to not get too serious about looking to get one. Then the D70 came out this year, and according to the reviews it not only had many of the things that the Rebel lacked, but it was even superior to more expensive cameras in some ways – like in lag time. I decided that the D70 would be my next camera. I didn’t expect to get it by the summer, but figured that with some luck I’d have it by the end of the year. Well, as it turned out, the summer isn't even halfway over and the D70 is in my hands, and while I'm very happy, I’m also a bit overwhelmed! It's one thing if I could spend 30 hours a week playing with this thing, but with a new house, a full-time job, etc., I'll be lucky to spend a quarter of that time playing with it!
Not only am I going from a compact prosumer digicam to a full-sized SLR, but I am also going from one brand, Canon, to another, Nikon. I’ve used Canons exclusively now for almost 3 years, so this is going to be as much of an adjustment as going to an SLR, since menu items are different, buttons are different, and of course the software is different. I’ve just started playing with the D70 and it feels so much more solid than any of the prosumer digicams I’ve had. It weighs more, of course, especially with a larger lens, and this just makes it feel less like a toy and more like a professional piece of equipment.
Other than the sheer size, the additional functionality, and all the different menus and buttons, I also have to deal with new software, or at least I may. For most of the time I’ve owned Canons, I’ve been using a program called Breezebrowser, which is highly regarded image management program built primarily for Canon digital cameras, although it does support other brands to a lesser extent. It has more features than Canon’s own software, particularly when it comes to RAW files. The canon S50 is a 5 megapixel camera and the Nikon is 6 megapixel, so one wouldn’t think the files would be that much bigger with a 1 megapixel jump, but they are. According to the D70, a 512MB compact flash card will only allow me to take about 47 pictures in its RAW format, while the S50 will give me twice that number! So I’m not sure whether to continue using RAW as I had been exclusively with the Canons. RAW is definitely the most flexible format, but if each raw file takes up over 10MB of space, I just don’t know if I can manage that on the storage devices at my disposal, and I don't feel like laying out yet more money for gobs more storage or blank dvd's to hold the results of each time I go out to shoot! So I may have to go back to Jpeg. Breezebrowser is a very nice program not just for converting but also for viewing, organizing, etc., and a companion product called Downloader Pro is the only one I’ve seen that allows you an incredible level of control over how images are downloaded and saved from a camera. I store my images in folders that coincide with when they were taken, so /2004/07/18/ would hold the files I took on July 18, 2004. Maybe not the best way of organizing, but I’ve gotten used to it. Nikon’s Picture Project, which comes with the D70, seems like a decent piece of software for making different sets of albums, allowing one to make different logical album categorizations without actually creating multiple copies of the images in those albums. Nikon Capture is a highly rated piece of software, but I’m not sure exactly its purpose yet. It only comes as a trial for the D70. Looks like it is maybe mostly for converting RAW images and editing images. I need to do some serious research and narrow down what the best software to use is so that I don’t have to go about learning half a dozen different packages!
Thom Hogan has an eBook about the D70 and I’ve ordered it because while the D70 manual is ok as far as digicam manuals go... it is a digicam manual! It gives you the basics, explains certain things that really don’t need explaining, and then shows you lots of LCD diagrams that make no visual sense. It doesn’t go into great detail on more advanced functionality either.
In any case, here are a few of the first pictures I’ve taken with the D70:
