old to me

[perlmonger]

I have a new toy this week, or rather an old toy that's new to me: a gloriously manual 50mm Nikkor lens that's now sitting happily on my D70s. It's well travelled, coming as it did from spride in NYC, who in turn had it from DHM; my thanks and gratitude to both, because it's lovely.

No metering, so that's an iterative process of test shot and check histogram, starting from a guess that should hopefully converge with the desired end-state over time. My only focus aid (other than sadly failing eyesight) is a tiny green dot that appears at the bottom left of the viewfinder when the camera reckons the focus area is about right. It works, but holding the shutter half-cocked (to stop the display timing out) while focusing is fiddly. It's times like this that I really miss my old ME Super.

But it works, a damned sight better than the crappy kit lens (second iteration¹) that came with the body. And I need to think about what I'm doing with the camera, which is a very good thing: freedom and creativity are defined in large part by their constraints. I'll never be a great photographer, or even a particularly good one, but I know that I'm liable to take better pictures, all else being equal, without a zoom and automated everything doing my thinking for me.

Now all I need is to allow myself the time to go and actually take photos. The few I've taken by way of testing, I've uploaded to flickr

¹ second, because a few weeks ago I dropped my camera onto a concrete surface: it landed lens-first, onto the lens hood, which likely prevented damage to the body, but did the lens no good whatsoever - "sproing" is the operative word here, I think. I've inherited ramtops' old D70 kit lens, which she no longer uses.

Comments

[stevewpalmer.livejournal.com]

My 50mm 1.8 version is my main lens. I recently got a second-hand D80 body and it auto-focuses the 1.8 (and will auto-focus the 1.4) which helps a lot as the green dot isn't very visible if the image in the viewfinder is particularly bright. Seems like the D70 is similar to the D40x and doesn't have the auto-focus motor on the body?

You'll love that lens. Despite having four others, I seem addicted to the 50mm 1.8.