My Nikon D70 - first impressions

I was commissioned to travel to Jamaica in September to take some pictures for a friend of mine of his villa. I had thought about renting or borrowing a camera to do the trip as I didn't have anything but an old broken Kodak DC215 (didn't zoom anymore) and Vern wanted me to be able to give some of his staff "instant" pictures while I was there.

I spent much of a day looking at my options, and settled on the Nikon D70 for a couple of reasons. My choice has been more than amply confirmed by my first few weeks of use of it, despite the fact that I didn't get to Jamaica.
Hurricane Ivan hit Jamaica the day I was to leave, and Air Canada cancelled the flights. The damage done is extensive enough that I'll have to go another time. In the mean time I spent the week leading up to the departure date and the weeks since getting back into the love of photography again.

In my past I've been a professional photographer (defined as making a significant portion of my income from the craft of taking pictures that my clients paid me for) and had a fairly complete Canon A1 system up until the early 80's. At that time I was heavily into the computer industry and Shirley was expecting our first child. I decided that the new (at that time) 8mm video was more reasonable for a growing family since 2 hours of tape was worth far less than 24 frames of still photos, and money was tight. I traded my whole system in for the video camera and have kept upgrading the video over the interveing years while only having a Pentax K1000 for film.

I've been watching the digial photo revolution in anticipation of the kids finally leaving home and finances getting better, and things finally came together where I felt I could get good enough results from a reasonably priced digital camera. I expect over the next few months and years to add to the mix, but for now the Nikon is doing a great job.

One of the things that the Nikon has impacted is the way I deal with the images it creates, and that is the topic of the next article.

The major reason I picked the Nikon over the Canon EOS Rebel (its closest competitor) is the speed of the Nikon's systems. It powers on and is ready fast enough that I've been able to grab opportunistic snap-shots of fast moving subjects without even thinking. I've actually taken to leaving the camera in the "fast subject" mode when I turn it off so that such snap-shooting is even faster. I got some interesting shots of an eagle flying overhead that I would simply not have gotten with the Canon as the bird was gone in the 3 or so seconds the Canon takes to get ready.

One of the other reasons I picked the Nikon is that it is the heavier of the two, and just felt better in my hand. I have a bit of a tremmor and felt that the added mass would give me better hand-held shots than the Canon would.

Along with the 18-70mm standard lens the camera came with, I also picked up a Sigma 70-300. These two lenses give me 35mm equivallent from 24mm to 450mm with just two lenses. Both are excellent and have given me excellent shots.

All of the shots in our family site pitt.pacdat.net since September this year are done using the Nikon.