ianspiers.com » Nikon D-70

Just Plain Ugly

Ian — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 22:31:09 +0000

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Among other things, this means that I’ve been enjoying a four-day weekend! Sure, it would’ve been nice if it hadn’t been raining for the last few days, but I think I’ve been handling it all quite well.

I drove out to the Downtown Seattle Goodwill this morning, in the pouring rain, and spent about an hour sifting thought various piles of treasure and junk. I still can’t believe that I found Bogen universal head tripod. It was in excellent condition so I scooped it up for just $9.99, which is totally ridiculous! I could turn around and sell it for about $100 right now, but since I lost my other tripod with my stolen car I’m just thrilled to have a replacement. And this tripod is much nicer that my old one!

Anyway, I’ve spent the majority of my day cooped up in the apartment, staying out of the nonstop, stereotypical Seattle rain, finishing up on the last of my homework. This gave me plenty of time to listen for the UPS carrier to deliver my new lens.

Ugly. I feel dirty just holding it. Can’t wait to take it out for a proper spin over the next few days.

My New 50mm Nikkor Lens

Ian — Sun, 21 Nov 2004 17:24:34 +0000

I broke down today and spent a hundred bucks on a new 50mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor lens for my D-70. The 18-70mm zoom lens is great, but the limitations associated with a maximum aperture of f/3.5 at 18mm have been apparent since that first morning I took my new camera out for a spin. I like low light too much to pass on this new lens.

A feature that’s worth mentioning is that the 50mm does have aperture marks for depth of field. The 18-70mm that comes with the Nikon D-70 kit doesn’t have those marks. I have no way to measure the limits of my depth of field and there’s no accurate gauge the hyper-focal focus on that lens! (Please tell me if I’m wrong about this.)
One more thing that’s worth mentioning is that this new lens is missing those “DX” letters in it’s name, so it’s not really acting like a 50mm lens. The conversion factor for film lenses to digital on the D-70 is x1.5, so this 50mm is actually more like a 75mm lens. Since this lens will work on either a Nikon film or digital camera–without some weird vignette, I should add–I’m really not too worried.
Anyway, I’ve only played with this new lens a bit today, shooting a little depth of field experiment that’s posted below. Yeah, it’s pretty lame, but if you don’t know exactly what I’ve been talking about then those pictures should give you the general idea about the “depth of feild” stuff.

Sitting In Class

Ian — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 12:51:27 +0000

I’m sitting in my Photography class right now, showing off my new camera. (For the amount it put my in debt, I’d better.) I couldn’t resist showing how easy it was for me to get these images online.
This is Sage. She’s sitting next to me.

Just how much is 2Gb?

Ian — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 18:22:07 +0000

I got up before dawn yesterday and started playing with my new camera. I took pictures all day long and into the night. I ended up with 302 pictures by the end of the evening, several of which I’ll even keep. The battery was worn down, but the 2Gb memory card in the camera indicated that I could’ve taken over 800 more shots!

The first thing I’ve learned is that this camera (with the 2Gb flash card) holds a lot of pictures! I was just playing around to see how the camera worked, so I wasn’t really extending myself for great shots. I was shooting “large” pictures in “normal” mode, and I like the quality of the images enough for web publishing. However, I’ll definitely be shooting at “fine” quality in the future, and that means I’ll only be able to capture about 582 images with an empty card!
I realize this is a bit sloppy, but I don’t have a lot of time right now. Here are a few of the pictures I took. I didn’t do much in Photoshop with these images except resize, crop and optimize them for the web.