old to me

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.