If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time you should know I’m something of a photography nut, and that goes back many years, and at one time it was a pretty serious obsession. But let’s skip the nostalgia, at least for now, and talk about the present. My good camera, a Fujifilm, is a pretty nice camera, but it is now more than 11 years old which makes it probably three or four generations behind the times. Technology has moved on. It’s time to replace it. So I did a lot of shopping around and and research and finally ended up with a Nikon D5600. It is considered to be at the high end of the consumer grade DSLR cameras. It’s been on the market for a few years so all the bugs are worked out of it and it has a solid track record. It is generally considered to be a pretty nice camera, so I got one with 2 lenses, an 18 – 55 mm lens and a 70mm to 300mm telephoto zoom.
It wasn’t… I was going to say it wasn’t cheap. But everything is relative. My first really good SLR camera was a Minolta XG-M with a 50mm lens that I got back in 1982, and I quickly added several other lenses to the package. Accounting for inflation the Minolta was actually more expensive than the Nikon.
I’ve only had the Nikon for a few days and I’m still trying to get it all figured out. The Fujifilm was bad enough with multiple menus, way too many buttons and knobs, and the ability to adjust just about everything. The Nikon is all that and a lot more. I can still just put it in one of the automatic modes and let its computers handle everything, but the fun part with cameras like this is when you shut off the automatics and venture out on your own experimenting with ISO, shutter speeds, light levels and other goodies. The automatic settings are fine for making fast snapshots of a family picnic or something like that. But if you want really good images, images that really show off the scene you’re photographing, that express moods and feelings, well then you need to shut off the auto modes and start fiddling around. And there’s a lot to fiddle with.
The biggest improvements over my old Fuji are the lenses and the image sensor. The image sensor is much, much larger, the pixels are smaller and packed more densely, giving a much crisper, more, oh, dense, let’s call it, image. That also means the size of the resulting photo is much larger. For jpg images that seems to be running about 7 – 10 megabytes. RAW files are even larger. And one mode produces both RAW and jpg files. So this thing needs a decent sized SD card.
The lenses – the Fuji had a really nice lens that was more than adequate for the job, but it was permanently attached to the camera and I wanted to be able to get other lenses for special purposes, like for macro photography, or bigger telephoto, that kind of thing. So far the quality of the two lenses I got for the Nikon seem excellent.
Of course the most important thing is does it make good photographs, so let’s look at a few I’ve taken over the last few days. You should be able to click on an image to see it in a larger size. Some of the images have been cropped but no other processing was done on them.
So far I’m pleased with the camera. I’m going to need to experiment and learn how to tweak the settings to get the results I want, but overall it seems to be pretty nice so far.
Now let’s talk about technology for a moment, specifically about photographic technology. Once upon a time I was heavily involved in film photography. I went through several 35mm cameras including some fairly expensive SLRs like the Minolta in that photo up there. That was the first really good camera I ever bought, purchased in 1981 or 1982. And it was expensive. I paid about $350+ for that camera at the time, a bit over $1,000 after including inflation. It was a very nice camera for its day. Still is. I still have it and it still works just fine. If I could be bothered to buy some 35mm film and deal with processing I have no doubt it would still turn out very good images even today.
I was pretty serious about photography. I also had my own darkroom and enlarger, developed my own film, made my own prints, etc. It was expensive, messy, I worked with potentially dangerous chemicals and I had to work in pitch black conditions or risk ruining the film or a print. It was a pain in the neck but it was also enormously satisfying.
A lot of semi-serious photographers complain about the decline of the use of film photography. They claim that digital photography lacks — well, lacks something. They don’t seem to be sure what it lacks, but for “reasons” digital just isn’t as good as film. The process isn’t as pure or something. Being able to manipulate images easily using Photoshop somehow makes images less real. That’s all BS of course. Film photographers like me always post-processed our prints to get the results we wanted. We just did it using chemicals, different types of photographic paper, dodging and burning and the like instead of tweaking settings on a computer.
I did pretty good with that old Minolta up there and my little darkroom. But I freely admit that the photos I produce today with modern equipment and software are so much better that there is simply no comparison. I would never, ever want to go back to the days of film.
I can understand why some people might feel that way, though. It’s like the people who think vinyl records are better than digitally recorded music. I share some of that feeling. I have a nice turntable and vinyl records and I love them. But even I admit that it is more a nostalgia thing than anything else. What I missed wasn’t some kind of ‘purity’ of the music, it was the process of playing the record that I missed. Getting out a record, putting it on the turntable, setting the tonearm down, I think it made me listen more attentively to the music because there was more physicality to the act. With modern streaming the music just plays. It’s almost like background noise, something you can ignore. When playing a record you couldn’t ignore it. You tended to concentrate more because you were physically involved with playing the record.
grouchyfarmer 