people places n things

Old but not forgotten

Finally coming up with the money to retire my venerable but failing D300s this spring and purchase Nikon’s long overdue D500, has made a stunning leap in my flexibility and image quality. If that wasn’t enough, my best friend Scott repaid me for helping him out last year with some small thing he needed assistance on but could not find anyone to help him with, by purchasing the D810 for me!!!! It’s a camera I was going to buy if Nikon didn’t come out with a replacement for the D300 anyway and now I have both.

If the D500 took my pictures to another level, having 2 camera’s again after 20 years doubled it. And having the second one be a full frame camera quadrupled it. Having a full frame the quality of the D810 takes things off the charts.

I own only three full frame auto focus lens at the moment but I have a nice collection of old manual focus nikkors to supplement them with, as by their nature they are all full frame. I’ve been using quite a few now and then on my D300 camera’s for years. With the D810, they get regular use now, and a few wide angles that made no sense on a cropped camera now are in full use too.

One that hadn’t joined the parade until today was my 28mm nikkor. What I really need is a 24mm, which is one manual focus lens I never got around to owning. But I think it is a much more perfectly situated focal length to go with what I’ve already got than my 28mm wide angle provides.

But after several trips it became clearly evident to me that my 35mm 1.4 came up too narrow and my 20mm 2.8 came up too wide in way too many situations and something in between had to be added into my kit. So today I dusted the ol’ girl off and dropped it in my bag before I left for Snug Harbor today. And on the first trip out it provided the perfect field of view for several shots today, including this one in the Chinese gardens.

Staten IslandSnug HarborspringChinese Scholar's gardenscenicflowerswisteriasld4