Ejecutive

I first got into photography about seven years ago, photographing the local bird and wildlife population. I live on the Isle of Sheppey, which features the Elmley Marshes RSPB reserve, which is one of the best places to see breeding birds and birds of prey.

Back then, I had my dad’s old Nikon F401s and a borrowed Sigma 400mm lens. Me and a friend would drive out to the reserve and wait for all sorts of bird of prey to turn up, including Kestrels, Marsh and Hen Harriers and Merlins. Back then, the auto-focus was slow (at least on my F401s) and film was expensive, each roll of Fujichrome Sensia 400 cost £10 but it did include processing.

On a good day, I went through four or five rolls of Sensia, which were promptly sent for processing. After four days, I’d get the slides back mounted and in neat little boxes. Then began the incredibly laborious task of scanning the slides and then printing them. My friend had a Nikon Coolscan LS-30, which at the time was pretty state—of—the—art, it scanned in film one frame at a time, taking two minutes for each frame.

Then after it scanned, it was tweaked, cropped and sharpened in Photoshop, which took about five minutes, then printing it with one of the first Epson consumer photo printers that took twenty minutes to print to A4. So in total I had to wait four days to get the film back from processing, spend at over an hour scanning in each of the 36 frames to find good shots (if there were any at all) and then wait twenty minutes for an A4 print.

I usually tried to do most of my post—processing when there was something good on TV, so at least I had something to watch during the idle time waiting for slides to scan and print, but it was still insanely boring. Eventually I took less photos not because I didn’t have time to take the photos, but because of the insane post—processing time I just didn’t have when I went to university.

Roll—ahead a few years and Nikon and Canon are in the middle of a prosumer digital war bringing prices crashing down. The Nikon D70 was the first digital SLR to have a retail price of under $1000, and then the Canon 300D undercut that even more. These appealed to me, they have better quality than using the old scanner to scan in slide film, but instead of taking four days of waiting and then over an hour of work to get 36 shots, a full memory card of 200 shots could be downloaded to my computer in minutes.

So I got myself a Nikon D80, and an Epson R800 printer. As I didn’t have to care about film and processing costs anymore I took far more shots and threw far more away, but usually it only took me an hour or so to go through 500 shots, compare that to before where it took me over an hour just to scan 36 shots. The new Epson printer chucked out an A4 print in under five minutes, and cost far less at it too.

I was happy. Infact I was so happy I bought a large range of lenses, from a wide angle 12-24mm zoom, to a professional 70-200mm f/2.8 telephoto zoom. A big investment, but an enjoyable and worthwhile one.

I took this rather heavy kit, clad in a fetching Crumpler shoulder bag, to a lot of places, but most notably Japan, where I managed to grab a few shots on what was a rather rushed tour.

But I felt slightly unfulfilled with the shots it produced. I couldn’t put my finger on it, I had a few decent pictures, couple very nice ones too, but for some strange reason I didn’t feel completely satisfied with the photographs. I’ve only ever used SLR cameras, big, chunky and loud machinery that made great photographs but were as big as 35mm cameras got, I felt like I needed a change.

Everyone knows Leica, they’re exquisitely made rangefinder cameras used extensively by photojournalists and travel photographers. However not everyone can afford one, with a good second—hand copy of the M6 costing upwards of £1000. Fortunately, there is a cheap Japanese alternative in the shape of the Yashica Electro; cheap, well built, excellent light meter and great lens? I managed to pick up a GT model from eBay for under £25.

I had a roll of Kodacolor left, so I put it in and eagerly went out to shoot with it. The shutter is almost silent, meaning you can shoot people in public without them noticing. Feeling the gears move under your finger as you wind on the film is a strangely enjoyable sensation, and just made me want to shoot more.

I’ve now bought a number of different films, Fuji Velvia, Ilford HP5+, Agfa Vista, and I’m enjoying photography more than ever. There are still times when I use my digital kit, on sport shoots, nature shoots and when travelling far away, but now my daily kit consists of just my Yashica and a few rolls of film. Much lighter, much quicker and much more inconspicuous. Perfect.

The first big official Nikon announcements for PMA have been made, both of which are upgrades on existing products rather than out and out new ones. A D40 DSLR upgrade and a 55-200mm lens upgrade.

D40x

The new D40x is exactly the same as the old D40 except it now contains the sensor and processing engine of the D80. This means it now has a 10.2 mega-pixel sensor as predicted, and a slightly faster 3 FPS burst rate.

Ken Rockwell will get his hands on a D40x this Wednesday, so I’m going to have to speculate on it’s performance based on what we’ve seen so far with Nikon’s cameras.

I suspect it’ll have the same image quality as the D80 and D200. If you take a shot of the same thing with the same settings and same lens with all three cameras, you’ll get exactly the same output. However I expect the D40x will retain the old D40′s 420-segment Matrix metering rather than the D80′s 1005-segment version, although the difference in metering will be minimal. Both the D80 and D40 over-expose images compared to the D200 and the D40x will be similar to the D40 and D80.

As it’ll have the same output as the D80 and D200, it should have the same high-sensitivity noise performance too, which is a great shame. The best thing about the D40 was the super-clean ISO1600 shots it produced. This made it a great indoor or night-time camera, especially when in tandem with the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens, which will even auto focus with it as it’s HSM. The D80 and D200 have pretty average high-ISO noise performance, and I wouldn’t personally use it at ISO1600 if I could avoid it.

What I suspect Nikon is doing is to set a low price DSLR to compete against the higher priced but similar mega-pixel count Canon, Pentax and Sony alternatives. Most consumers will mainly look at the mega-pixel number to decide which camera to buy, and when you can get a D40x with 10 mega-pixels for a significant amount less than a Canon 400D, if I was an uninformed consumer I know which one I would go for.

But this is not to say you’ll be disappointed with the images from the D40x. The D80 and D200 produce superb low ISO pictures, and the extra pixels will allow you to crop a bit more. Nikon have posted some samples of the D40x and they do look very encouraging.

55-200mm VR

The most interesting thing about the D40x samples however, is that most of them are taken with the new 55-200mm VR lens. This is Nikon’s first consumer VR lens¹ with a US list prices of $249.95² it’s a very cheap lens aimed squarely at consumers. But if you look at the samples taken with the D40x, you could be fooled into thinking it was the 70-300mm VR, or even the 70-200mm VR lens which costs many times more.

This lens seems to be a fantastic light travel-zoom to compliment heavier and faster zoom lenses. It has the sharpness and VR, which helps a bit with the small aperture, and it only weighs 335g. While a 18-200mm VR would be more convenient, it seems the 55-200mm trounces that lens at the long end, where it still remains very sharp.

There is still some confusion over the specifications though. It’s not specified whether it’s a VR or VRII, although it’s probably just VR. One Nikon site specifies it with a seven-bladed aperture, but on another it has a nine-bladed aperture. Also, the old 55-200mm lens didn’t have real AF-S capabilities. Instead of having a ring type motor directly rotating a floating lens element, it just had a normal motor like that driven by old screw AF-D type lenses, except this was built into the lens body. This meant it was pretty silent at focusing, but was slow and didn’t have full-time manual over-ride like that of real AF-S lenses. I suspect this is still the fake AF-S.

I await Ken Rockwell’s review as that should clear up any ambiguity with this lens, and also give us some sample shots not taken by Nikon.

My new love.