Old Photographer Series

A few days ago I asked myself a fairly simple question.

What happens when you put a $35 lens from another photographic age onto a 45.7-megapixel Nikon D850?

Now I know. You go out and make photographs. And the photographs turn out to be considerably more interesting than the question.

The lens is my old Nikon AF Nikkor 70–210mm f/4–5.6. I didn’t buy it specially for this experiment. I’ve owned it for some time and paid the princely sum of $35 for it. I’ve used it successfully on my Nikon D700, so I already knew it wasn’t rubbish.

But the D700 has a 12-megapixel sensor. The D850 has 45.7 megapixels.

According to one particular school of internet photography, putting an inexpensive old autofocus zoom in front of that sensor is bordering on criminal negligence.

Apparently the D850 demands the finest glass.

Perhaps somebody forgot to tell my lens.

The D850 itself is another second-hand adventure. I recently picked it up for $380. It looks almost ridiculously good externally, although its shutter count is somewhere north of 300,000.

So we have a high-mileage professional DSLR that cost $380 and an old Nikon zoom that cost $35.

Total investment: $415.

I decided to take the combination onto the streets and see what happened.

No brick walls. No test charts. No tripod carefully positioned in the living room. No photographs of newspapers designed to reveal whether the extreme corner at 210mm is microscopically less sharp than the centre.

I photographed what I normally photograph.

People. Buildings. Details. Colour. The odd cat. Life.

Because after more than 45 years of making pictures, that’s the only lens test I’m really interested in.

The first surprise wasn’t really a surprise at all. The old Nikkor is sharp. Not “surprisingly sharp considering it cost $35.” Sharp.

The cat provided a rather good test. Fine fur, whiskers and those extraordinary green eyes all came through beautifully. The D850 certainly wasn’t sitting there waiting desperately for a more expensive lens.

The old wooden wheels were another useful example. Wood grain, spokes, rust, vegetation, corrugated metal and the chaotic collection of overhead wires gave the combination plenty of fine detail to resolve. It did.

Would a modern professional 70–200mm produce a technically better file if we put both photographs under a microscope?

Almost certainly.

Would it make this photograph better? That’s a completely different question.

That’s where photography equipment discussions so often go wrong.

We confuse technical superiority with photographic superiority. They aren’t the same thing.

A lens can measure better without making a more interesting photograph. Another lens can have imperfections and still render the world in a way that suits the photographer using it.

I don’t need my 70–210mm to beat a modern 70–200mm f/2.8 in a laboratory. I need it to make photographs I want to keep. On this outing, it did exactly that. The architectural pictures were particularly revealing.

The D850’s resolution combined with the longer focal lengths allowed me to pick pieces out of the city rather than simply describe everything in front of me.

A dome appears through foliage.

A tower rises above surrounding buildings.

Old wooden wheels become a pattern of circles and spokes against industrial metal.

And then there is the changing city itself.

The photograph looking across the greenery and low buildings towards the modern towers says something that has always interested me about photographing Phnom Penh.

Cities accumulate rather than simply replace themselves. The old and new sit beside each other. Sometimes comfortably. Sometimes not.

A telephoto zoom is particularly good at showing that because compression pulls those layers together.

The foreground, modest buildings and high-rise development become part of the same visual argument.

This isn’t something I need an f/2.8 professional zoom to discover.

The $35 lens sees it perfectly well.

But people are where I really wanted to test the combination. I’ve always enjoyed using longer lenses for street photography.

There is sometimes a rather tiresome idea that proper street photography must be made with a 28mm or 35mm lens while standing practically on top of the subject. I’ve never subscribed to that. Different lenses make us see differently. A wide lens encourages you to enter the scene. A longer lens allows you to observe it, isolate elements and simplify the background.

Neither approach is superior.

They’re different languages.

With the 70–210mm I can stand away from the immediate action and watch. The photograph of the man working from the back of the small vehicle demonstrates exactly why I enjoy this. The red jacket immediately separates him from the greens and blues around him. The longer lens compresses the background without completely removing the environment. We know we’re on a street. We know he’s working. But the frame isn’t drowning in irrelevant information.

That’s what a telephoto can do extremely well.

The photograph of the two workers gave me another answer. The lens renders people nicely. That’s important to me. There is detail in the faces, certainly. The D850 isn’t short of resolution. But the result doesn’t feel clinically sharp. There’s a difference between detail and cruelty.

Modern lenses can sometimes be astonishingly revealing. That’s magnificent for some subjects and less flattering for others. This old Nikkor gives me enough. Actually, considerably more than enough.

And there’s a natural quality to the rendering that I like. The two men aren’t lens-test subjects. They’re people. That’s where my attention stays.

The 70–210mm range also encourages something I particularly enjoy when walking around with a camera: finding photographs inside photographs.

At longer focal lengths you begin noticing small relationships in the distance. A tower framed between buildings. Palm leaves intruding into architecture. Scaffolding against a geometric structure. Overhead wires crossing an otherwise orderly composition.

The lens becomes a way of editing the world before pressing the shutter.

Instead of asking “What can I fit into the frame?” I’m asking:

“What can I remove?”

That’s one of the reasons telephoto lenses can be so effective for street and urban photography.

Even something as brutally functional as the underside of a flyover becomes interesting. Concrete pillars repeat into the distance. Lines converge. Light appears between enormous grey structures. There’s almost no conventional subject.

It’s geometry. Weight. Repetition. And perspective.

Again, the old lens handles it perfectly well.

No drama. No complaints. No desperate plea from the D850 for something more expensive.

Just a photograph.

There are limitations, naturally.

The 70–210mm has no vibration reduction.

At the long end, that matters on a 45.7-megapixel camera.

The D850 is unforgiving of sloppy technique. Slight camera movement that might disappear into a 12-megapixel D700 file can become rather obvious when you’ve got this much resolution.

So shutter speed matters. I’d rather increase the ISO than let the shutter speed fall too far. Noise can be dealt with. Motion blur usually can’t.

The autofocus is also from another generation. This is screw-drive autofocus, powered by the motor inside the D850 body. It makes noises. Things move. You can actually hear the bloody camera doing something and it actually uses more battery power, so an extra battery in the pocket is a wise move.

How wonderfully old-fashioned. But it focuses. And that’s really all I require.

There are other optical imperfections if you go looking for them. I’m sure I could find chromatic aberration. I’m sure the corners aren’t as good as the centre at every aperture and focal length. I’m sure there are situations where flare would expose the limitations of the older coatings.

Give me enough time and a large enough computer monitor and I’ll undoubtedly discover all sorts of reasons why I desperately need to spend another thousand dollars.

I’m not going to.

Look at the photograph of the stone figures. Texture. Separation. Fine detail. Tonal variation.

The photograph works.

Test concluded.

Colour was another pleasant surprise.

The lens doesn’t produce the dull, washed-out results that people sometimes associate with older zooms.

Reds are red. Greens are green. Blues are blue. The colourful street decoration positively jumps out of the frame.

Some of that is obviously the D850 sensor. Some comes from processing.

That’s how digital photography works. But the lens isn’t getting in the way.

And that’s perhaps the highest compliment I can give a piece of photographic equipment.

I stopped thinking about it.

This photograph probably says more about the experiment than any technical test could.

A man sits astride his scooter beside the road, absorbed in something he’s doing with his hands.

Behind him the traffic continues. Motorcycles approach. Cars pass. The city carries on.

The longer lens isolates that tiny pause within all the movement. That’s why I carry a camera.

Not to determine whether a lens resolves 45 megapixels. To notice things.

And once again we’re back to the thing I’ve learned repeatedly over the years. Equipment matters. But equipment matters because of what it allows you to see.

The repeating grey columns make another photograph that the longer lens handles beautifully. Lines narrow towards the centre, layers stack against one another and the frame becomes almost abstract.

I didn’t need a new lens to see it.

I needed to look.

There is an enormous difference.

The photograph of the craftsman is probably my favourite demonstration of what this old lens can actually do.

Here is precisely the sort of subject I photograph naturally. A man working. Tools scattered around him. A hammer in one hand. Metal in the other.

A red shirt separating him immediately from the cluttered workshop.

There is enough compression to organise the chaos without destroying the environment. And there is plenty of detail.

Look at the hands. The hammer. The rods. The texture of the wooden block. The dirt on the trousers. The objects scattered across the floor.

The lens has recorded all of it.

The tighter frame works even better for judging the rendering.

His face is clear. His expression is there. His hands tell us what he’s doing. Everything I need from the photograph is present.

So what exactly would spending another thousand dollars have added? Perhaps technically quite a lot.

Photographically? I’m not convinced it would have added anything.

And that’s the point.

This was never really an experiment about whether an old Nikon zoom could satisfy a 45.7-megapixel sensor.

It was an experiment about whether we sometimes ask completely the wrong question.

Instead of:

Is this lens sharp enough?

Perhaps we should ask:

Does it make photographs I care about?

Instead of:

Is this camera too old?

Ask:

Does it still do what I need?

Instead of:

Should I upgrade?

Try:

What would I actually photograph differently if I did?

Those questions can save you an extraordinary amount of money.

More importantly, they can get you back to photography.

My D850 cost $380.

My AF Nikkor 70–210mm f/4–5.6 cost $35.

Together:

$415.

For that I’ve got 45.7 megapixels, full-frame image quality, excellent autofocus from the camera body, a useful 70–210mm range and a combination capable of producing every photograph shown here.

That’s absurd value. But after this outing, the money is almost beside the point. The important discovery is that I enjoyed using the combination. The D850 felt good. The old lens felt familiar.

I stopped thinking about equipment and started looking at Phnom Penh.

People. Buildings. Shapes. Colours. Little moments.

Exactly what a camera is supposed to make me do.

So did my $35 Nikkor survive being attached to the mighty Nikon D850?

Wrong question.

Did I make photographs with it that I’m happy with?

Yes.

That’s the only test that matters. The D850 didn’t expose the old lens as obsolete. It exposed just how much life was still left in it. Thirty-five dollars.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Old Photographer Series

The Old Photographer Series

There comes a point in a photographer’s life when numbers begin to matter less.

Megapixels. Frames per second. Dynamic range. Autofocus points. Shutter counts.

I’ve spent more than 45 years taking pictures, and I’ve lived through enough generations of cameras to know that we photographers have a peculiar ability to worry about things that aren’t actually stopping us from making photographs.

And then I bought a Nikon D850 for $380.

There had to be a catch.

There was.

The shutter count was north of 300,000.

For some photographers, that number would be enough to put the camera straight back on the shelf. Nikon rated the D850 shutter mechanism for 200,000 cycles, so 300,000 sounds rather like buying a car with 300,000 miles on the clock.

Except cameras aren’t cars. And shutter ratings aren’t death sentences.

The camera was sitting there looking almost ridiculously good. Externally I’d describe it as A1. It hadn’t been knocked about, the body wasn’t scarred from years of abuse, and nothing immediately suggested a camera that had already made more than 300,000 exposures.

I picked it up. That familiar Nikon solidity was there. Then I pressed the shutter. It sounded good. Not tired. Not hesitant. No strange metallic noises or anything suggesting the mechanism was preparing to throw itself across the room. Just that wonderfully purposeful D850 shutter. Clack.

A photograph. And suddenly I wasn’t terribly interested in the number anymore.

I’ve owned and used enough cameras over the years to understand that mechanical things eventually wear out. A shutter can fail at 50,000 exposures. Another can carry on well beyond its manufacturer’s rated life. Two hundred thousand actuations doesn’t mean that the D850 shutter self-destructs at exposure number 200,001.

It is a durability rating, not an appointment with the undertaker.

My camera has already proved the point rather convincingly. It’s passed 300,000.

The interesting question isn’t how many photographs the camera has already taken.

It’s how many photographs it still has left in it.

And nobody knows. Perhaps the shutter will fail next week.

Perhaps it will make another 100,000 exposures. That’s the gamble. But at $380, it’s a gamble I’m perfectly comfortable taking.

There was a time when I might have thought differently.

When you’re younger and buying equipment represents a substantial investment, you tend to protect it. Every scratch hurts. Every little mark on the baseplate feels like a personal tragedy. You buy protective screens. Protective filters. Protective cases.

Then you put your expensive camera inside an expensive bag designed to protect the protective things protecting the camera.

Eventually you realise something.

Cameras are supposed to be used.

That’s particularly true of the Nikon D850.

When Nikon introduced the D850 in 2017, it was one of those rare cameras where almost everything came together.

The 45.7-megapixel full-frame sensor delivered extraordinary detail. Dynamic range was superb. Autofocus was inherited from Nikon’s professional D5 generation. It could shoot quickly enough for serious action photography while simultaneously producing files capable of enormous prints.

It wasn’t really a specialist camera. It was a camera that could do almost everything.

Landscape photographers loved it. Studio photographers loved it. Wedding photographers used it. Wildlife photographers used it. Photojournalists used it.

And people like me discovered that despite its size, it could make a formidable street camera.

Nearly a decade later, none of those abilities have disappeared.

That’s something we sometimes forget.

A camera doesn’t become worse because something newer has appeared.

The photographs coming out of a D850 today are every bit as good as the photographs that came out of one when photographers were queuing to buy them new.

Technology moves forward.

Image quality doesn’t move backwards.

And 45.7 megapixels is still an enormous amount of information.

In fact, for most of what I photograph, it’s far more than I actually need.

The great advantage of my particular D850 is that I don’t have to worry about it. That’s worth more than people realise.

I didn’t spend several thousand dollars on it. I spent $380. If I put another scratch on the bottom plate, I won’t lose sleep. If the rubber gets polished from my hands, good. If the paint eventually wears around the edges, even better. That’s what cameras are supposed to look like. They’re tools.

I’ve always had a fondness for old cameras precisely because they develop character. A camera that’s been used carries something of its history with it.

And this D850 certainly has a history. Three hundred thousand photographs.

Think about that for a moment. I have no idea what those photographs were. Perhaps weddings. Perhaps portraits. Perhaps products photographed in a studio. Maybe somebody used it for time-lapse work. Perhaps there are thousands upon thousands of photographs of things completely forgotten now.

I’ll probably never know.

But somebody pressed that shutter more than 300,000 times. Now it’s my turn. There’s something I rather like about that.

The obsession with shutter count has grown alongside the used-camera market.

Mention that you’re looking at a used DSLR and one of the first questions you’ll hear is:

“What’s the shutter count?”

Fair enough.

It’s useful information.

If two otherwise identical D850 bodies are sitting beside each other at the same price and one has made 20,000 exposures while the other has made 300,000, I’d take the 20,000-exposure camera.

I’m an old photographer. I’m not completely daft. But price changes everything. At $380, I’m not comparing this camera with a pristine low-mileage D850. I’m asking a different question.

How much photography can I get for $380?

And the answer is potentially quite extraordinary.

For less than the cost of many modern lenses, I’ve got one of the finest DSLRs Nikon ever produced.

A professional-grade body. A magnificent sensor. Excellent autofocus. Superb handling. An enormous optical viewfinder.

Files with enough latitude to take considerable punishment in processing.

And, perhaps most importantly, a camera that makes me want to go out and take photographs. That’s the bit specifications can’t measure.

I’ve reached an age where I’m increasingly uninterested in owning cameras simply because they’re new.

I’ve watched photography travel from film to early digital cameras, through the DSLR revolution and now into the mirrorless age.

Every generation arrives accompanied by claims that everything before it has suddenly become obsolete.

It never quite happens.

My old Nikon D700 can still make wonderful photographs. So can a D800. So can a D810.

So can the professional Nikon bodies that once sat in newspaper offices and photographers’ bags around the world.

And the D850 sits very close to the summit of that entire DSLR era.

Perhaps it is the summit.

It arrived when Nikon had decades of experience building professional SLRs and nearly two decades of experience making serious digital SLRs.

Everything Nikon had learned seemed to end up inside it. The ergonomics. The viewfinder. The autofocus. The metering. The sensor. The durability.

It feels like the final flowering of a particular philosophy of camera design.

Put your eye to the viewfinder and you’re looking through the lens. Not at a tiny television.

At the world.

There’s still something wonderfully direct about that.

I don’t know when the shutter in my D850 will eventually stop. That’s part of the deal.

If it happens, I’ll make a decision.

If replacing the shutter makes financial sense, I’ll replace it.

If it doesn’t, I’ll have had my money’s worth. But I’m certainly not going to spend whatever life remains in the shutter worrying about its death. That would be rather ridiculous. Imagine buying an old Leica and refusing to use it because operating the shutter might wear it out. Or buying a classic car and never driving it because the engine has already done too many miles.

Objects designed to work should work. Cameras designed to take photographs should take photographs. So this D850 is going into the bag. It’ll walk the streets. It’ll get hot. It’ll get dusty. It’ll probably acquire a few marks. And every time I press that shutter, the supposedly frightening number will increase.

300,001.

300,002.

300,003.

Good. Keep going. Because after all these years, I’ve realised that the shutter count that really matters isn’t the number already on the camera. It’s the number of photographs still inside the photographer. That’s the count I’m interested in now.

And at $380, this battered-in-spirit but beautiful-in-the-hand Nikon D850 and I have made a rather simple agreement.

I’ll keep looking. It’ll keep clicking.

And we’ll see which one of us gives up first.

Old Photographer Series