Today I had special experience. I have a friend who was been so nice and
borrowed me for four hours his Nikon D70. Yes, the digital camera I have
read a lot about. And I must say that
Dave is partly guilty as well. I
am reading his journey to digital world and it influence me a lot as most
of the things he is writing from the world of photography.
But back to Nikon D70. Handling, Ooh man it is great! Really this camera
must be made for me. After adjusting few custom options I made it fitting
my way of taking pictures. This is probably first auto focus camera which
convinced me that auto focus is a good thing and can help rather than
disturb when making pictures. This is again, I believe, based on some small
note by Dave. I made AE/AF lock button working as focus button. I chosen
only central point as focus point and when I push this AE/AF lock button it
focus and when released it lock the focus at the same place. So it is like
manual focusing you made focus and you leave it there until you need to
refocus again. Main shutter button when half pressed lock exposure until is
half pressed. This way I have full control and speed of auto focusing while
keeping freedom to recompose as I wish.
I was shooting on Aperture priority as I always do with my film cameras if
possible. This give me complete control about depth of sharpness which I
use a lot in my compositions and I do not care often about time.
About the factor of small CCD comparing to size of 35mm frame. Well I must
say that again I agree with Dave that when you want 50mm feeling at the end
you end up with using 50mm lens and not 35mm or 28mm. You get smaller crop
put feeling stays.
The D70 I tried today has cheap 28-80 3.5-5.6f Nikkor lens on it and was
lighter than my Olympus OM2n with 5-/1.4f lens. I felt with camera
completely comfortable. I also noticed that based on number of pictures. In
less than three hours I did over one hundred shots while with Leica M6TTL
which I have borrowed some half year ago I did hardly 12 in the same
time.
The other thing is when you look at pictures. I made NEF (Nikon RAW
format) and I saw so far only direct translation, so I didn't try to made
any adjustment or anything. I can see that camera, I guess as more digital
cameras, has a problem with exposure range. It is quite narrow. Almost all
the time I was using matrix metering and in today heavy sun day most of the
time no details in highlights and or shadows. I did few tests on difficult
lighting situations and I am sure that film camera with the same matrix
metering would bring better results. But let's wait with this until I look
what is possible to gt from raw format.
All and all I was really surprised and amazed with handling of the camera.
It was fats in reactions natural in handling, light and with good feeling.
Maybe I should try Nikon F80 as a film camera :-))))
