I Put a $35 Lens on a $380 Nikon D850 — And Took It to the Streets

cameras, Lenses, nikon, opinons, thoughts, photography, pictures, street, Travel

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

Why I Almost Never Buy Cameras New

cameras, canon, Lenses, nikon, opinons, thoughts, photography, pictures, street, Travel

Old Photographer Series

I have been taking photographs for more than 45 years, and in all that time I have bought precisely one camera brand-new.

A Canon EOS-1D Mark IV.

That’s it.

Every other camera has, in one way or another, already had a life before it reached me.

Some photographers might find that strange. Photography is an industry built around the excitement of the new. New cameras arrive accompanied by countdowns, rumours, previews, launch events and endless YouTube videos explaining why the perfectly capable camera we owned yesterday has apparently become hopelessly inadequate overnight.

I’ve never been particularly interested in playing that game.

Not because I don’t appreciate technology. I do.

Modern cameras are astonishing.

But I’ve learned something rather useful over the years:

Let somebody else chase the technology. I’ll chase the photographs.

Buying used started partly because it made financial sense.

Good photographic equipment has never been cheap, particularly professional equipment. But photographers are peculiar creatures. We will spend thousands on a camera and then, three or four years later, sell it for a fraction of what we paid because another camera has appeared with a few more megapixels and an autofocus system capable of recognising the left eyeball of a swallow at 200 metres.

That’s fine by me.

I’ll wait.

Depreciation is one of the used-camera buyer’s greatest friends.

A professional camera doesn’t suddenly stop being professional when its replacement appears. It simply becomes cheaper.

The photographer who bought it new absorbs the frightening part of the depreciation.

I arrive later.

The Nikon D700 is perhaps one of the best examples.

When it appeared, it was a serious professional tool. Its full-frame sensor was superb for the period, its autofocus was dependable, the body was built properly and photographers used it to make pictures that appeared in newspapers, magazines, books, exhibitions and probably on more wedding albums than anyone could count.

Today it’s old. Twelve megapixels. No sophisticated video. No eye-detection autofocus. No electronic viewfinder. No artificial intelligence trying to work out whether I’m photographing a human, a bird, a dog or somebody’s motorcycle.

And yet I still love using it.

More importantly, it still makes excellent photographs. That fact tends to get lost whenever we talk about camera technology. A new camera may be better than an old camera. That doesn’t automatically make the old camera worse.

My recently acquired Nikon D850 demonstrates the madness particularly well.

It cost me $380.

There’s a reason. The shutter count is over 300,000.

If you spend too much time reading camera forums, that number might have you reaching for smelling salts. But the camera is externally in A1 condition. It sounds right. It works.

So I bought it.

The D850 was once one of the most desirable DSLRs in the world. It has a 45.7-megapixel full-frame sensor, excellent dynamic range, formidable autofocus and enough image quality for almost anything I’m ever likely to ask of it.

None of that disappeared because the shutter counter passed 300,000. And none of it disappeared because Nikon subsequently concentrated on mirrorless cameras.

I paid $380 and started taking photographs. If the shutter dies eventually, I’ll deal with it then. That’s the advantage of buying equipment at this end of the depreciation curve.

I’m not frightened of it.

Then there’s the lens currently sitting on the front.

An AF Nikkor 70–210mm f/4–5.6.

Cost?

$35.

I’ve already used it on the D700 and know it can produce excellent results.

Now I’m going to see what happens when I put that $35 lens in front of the D850’s 45.7-megapixel sensor.

Total investment:

$415.

A Nikon D850 and an autofocus 70–210mm zoom. There’s something wonderfully ridiculous about that. But it also illustrates why I’ve spent so much of my photographic life buying used equipment. I don’t need equipment to be new. I need it to work.

There is another advantage that has become increasingly important to me.

Freedom.

Buying an expensive new camera can sometimes make you strangely protective of it. You notice every mark. You worry about scratches. You buy covers and protectors. Rain appears and suddenly you’re wondering whether you should put the camera back into the bag. You start treating the tool as though its purpose is to preserve its resale value.

I’ve never wanted to photograph that way. A used camera already has a history. Someone has already put the first scratch on it. Thank you very much. That’s one less job for me. Now I can get on with using the bloody thing.

I don’t abuse equipment.

There’s a difference between using something and deliberately mistreating it. I look after my cameras. But cameras accompany me into the real world. They get carried. They get dusty. They get sweaty. They get knocked occasionally. Paint wears. Rubber becomes shiny. Little marks appear around the edges. To me, those aren’t necessarily defects. They’re evidence.

They say:

This camera has been somewhere.

I rather like that.

Buying used also teaches you something about what really matters.

When you aren’t chasing the newest equipment, you stop thinking quite so much about specifications.

Instead, you start thinking about suitability.

Does the camera fit my hand? Do I trust the autofocus? Can I operate it without thinking? Do I like the files? Does the viewfinder allow me to concentrate on what’s happening in front of me? And perhaps the most important question:

Do I want to carry it?

A camera that makes you want to go outside is worth considerably more than a technically superior camera sitting in a cupboard.

I’ve owned and used enough equipment to understand that the relationship between photographer and camera is difficult to measure.

Some cameras simply feel right. The D700 is one. There are others. You pick them up and within minutes you’re no longer thinking about the camera. You’re looking.

That’s when equipment becomes useful.

The camera industry doesn’t particularly benefit from people thinking this way. It needs us to believe we’re perpetually one generation behind. More resolution. More speed. Better autofocus. Higher ISO. More dynamic range. More computational photography.

And again, none of these things is bad.

Progress is good.

But technological progress and photographic progress are not the same thing.

You can improve your camera without improving your photography.

That’s an uncomfortable thought in an industry that would much rather sell you another body than suggest you spend a year properly learning the one you’ve already got.

The Canon EOS-1D Mark IV remains the odd one out in my history.

The one I bought new.

And I’m glad I did.

It was a magnificent professional camera and buying it new gave me the experience of owning a serious tool from the beginning of its working life.

But apparently once was enough. Because I never developed the habit. Instead, I’ve spent decades wandering around the second-hand market looking for cameras that other photographers have decided they no longer need. And I’ve benefited enormously from their impatience.

Someone wants the latest model? Wonderful. Sell me the old one.

Someone needs another ten megapixels? Excellent. I’ll take the supposedly obsolete camera.

Someone has decided DSLRs are finished because mirrorless has taken over?

Even better.

Now we’re talking about prices I like.

There is, of course, some risk. Buying used means checking equipment properly.

Shutters wear. Autofocus systems can be damaged. Sensors can be scratched. Card slots fail. Batteries die. Old lenses can develop fungus or haze.

You need to know what you’re looking at.

But after enough years around cameras, you develop a feel for these things.

Pick it up. Look through it. Press the buttons. Turn the dials. Listen to the shutter. Take photographs. Examine the results. A camera will often tell you quite a lot if you’re prepared to pay attention.

And sometimes you take a gamble.

My $380 D850 is one. Over 300,000 shutter actuations? Fine. At that price, I’ll take the bet.

Perhaps my attitude has changed with age as well. When I was younger, equipment represented possibility. Maybe the next camera would make me better. Maybe the next lens would change everything.

After 45 years, I know better.

Cameras don’t find photographs. Photographers do.

The equipment matters, certainly. Anyone claiming otherwise is being silly. The right lens can change how you see a situation. A better sensor can allow you to work in conditions that would once have been impossible. Reliable autofocus can mean getting a picture rather than missing it.

But eventually equipment reaches a level where good enough really is good enough.

Photography doesn’t begin when you have the best camera. Photography begins when you stop thinking about the camera. That’s probably why old equipment appeals to me. There’s no expectation attached to it. Nobody is asking whether my ten-year-old DSLR justifies its purchase price. Nobody cares whether my $35 lens resolves 45.7 megapixels.

Good.

Neither do I.

I want to know whether it resolves the expression on somebody’s face.

Whether it catches the light falling across a street. Whether it isolates a gesture. Whether, when I look at the photograph later, I feel something. If it does those things, the equipment has succeeded.

So I’ll continue buying cameras the way I always have. Late. Used. Depreciated. Occasionally battered. Preferably cheap. I’ll let somebody else enjoy opening the box and peeling the protective plastic from the screen.

They can watch the reviews.

They can debate the specifications.

They can upgrade when the replacement arrives.

And a few years later, when that once revolutionary camera has somehow become yesterday’s technology, perhaps I’ll buy it from them. For considerably less.

Then I’ll put an equally unfashionable lens on the front and take it onto the street. Because after all these years, I’ve finally worked out which upgrade matters most.

It isn’t another camera. It’s another photograph.

Let somebody else chase the technology. I’ll chase the photographs.

Old Photographer Series

JPEG vs RAW: Finding Balance in Photography: Old Photographer Series.

cameras, opinons, thoughts, photography, pictures, street, Travel

After more than four decades of making photographs, I have come to the conclusion that photographers can turn almost anything into an argument.

Nikon against Canon. DSLR against mirrorless. Prime against zoom. Manual against autofocus. Film against digital. And somewhere among all this noise sits one of the old favourites:

JPEG or RAW?

Mention JPEG in certain photographic circles and somebody will look at you as though you have just admitted to putting ketchup on a Michelin-starred dinner.

“You shoot JPEG?” Yes. Sometimes I do.

And the world continues to turn.

I have shot RAW for years. I understand exactly why it exists and what it gives me. A RAW file contains considerably more information than a JPEG. It gives me greater latitude with exposure, white balance, highlights and shadows. If I have slightly cocked things up when I pressed the shutter, RAW gives me a better chance of rescuing the photograph afterwards.

That is useful.

But somewhere along the road, photographers began confusing useful with essential.

It isn’t.

The question isn’t whether RAW is technically superior. It is. The question is whether that technical superiority matters for the photograph you are making. Those are two very different things.

When I started taking pictures there was no RAW file waiting patiently for me to change my mind. You chose your film. You chose your exposure. You made decisions before pressing the shutter because those decisions mattered.

Kodachrome was Kodachrome. Tri-X was Tri-X.

If you got the exposure badly wrong, you didn’t pull a little slider marked “Highlights” and congratulate yourself on recovering two stops. You had a badly exposed photograph.

That taught discipline.

Digital photography has given us extraordinary freedom, and I wouldn’t willingly surrender it. But freedom can make us lazy. RAW files can encourage the idea that exposure is merely a rough suggestion to be sorted out later.

I’ll fix it in post.

Possibly the most expensive five words in modern photography.

JPEG asks something slightly different of the photographer. It asks you to make more decisions at the time of exposure. White balance matters. Picture settings matter. Exposure matters. You are allowing the camera to take the information coming from the sensor and produce something close to a finished photograph.

There is something rather refreshing about that.

You take the picture. You look at it. You like it. Finished.

No enormous file. No twenty minutes staring at Lightroom wondering whether the shadows should be +17 or +23. No making six versions and eventually deciding that the first one was better.

Just a photograph.

And perhaps that is why I have become more sympathetic towards JPEG as I’ve become older.

I don’t need every photograph to be a technical excavation.

Sometimes I simply want to make pictures.

Walking around Phnom Penh with a camera, I am far more interested in the man crossing the road, the expression on someone’s face, the shaft of afternoon light falling through a doorway or the brief collision of people and background that lasts perhaps half a second.

That is photography to me. Nobody looking at the finished picture is going to lean forward and whisper: “Magnificent. I can really see the 14-bit colour depth.” They either respond to the photograph or they don’t.

That doesn’t mean RAW is pointless. Far from it.

If I am photographing something important, working in difficult or rapidly changing light, dealing with extreme contrast, or simply know that I am going to want maximum control over the finished image, I will shoot RAW without hesitation.

RAW is insurance.

And sometimes insurance is bloody useful.

A slightly underexposed face can be recovered beautifully. White balance can be corrected without destroying the file. Highlights that appear gone may still contain information. A difficult image can be worked carefully until it resembles what I saw—or, perhaps more accurately, what I remember seeing.

For serious printing, particularly large prints, I like having that information available. But there is another side to it. RAW creates work.

Big files. More storage. More backups. More processing. More decisions. More time sitting in front of a computer instead of walking around with a camera.

After 45 years, I know which side of that equation interests me most. It isn’t the computer.

Photography has gradually become extraordinarily good at persuading us that everything must be maximised.

Maximum dynamic range. Maximum resolution. Maximum bit depth. Maximum sharpness. Maximum editing latitude. Maximum everything.

Except, occasionally, enjoyment.

And that is where JPEG deserves another hearing.

A properly exposed JPEG from a good camera can be astonishingly good. Modern cameras are remarkably sophisticated at processing their own files. Even some of my older cameras produce JPEGs that need very little attention.

Get the exposure right. Get the light right. Get the moment right.

There isn’t necessarily much left to do.

And here’s the uncomfortable part.

If a photograph only becomes interesting because I spent forty minutes dragging sliders around, perhaps the problem wasn’t the file format.

Perhaps the photograph wasn’t very interesting.

RAW cannot rescue a boring picture.

It cannot put expression into a blank face. It cannot improve timing. It cannot move your feet three steps to the left. It cannot clean up a dreadful background. It cannot make you notice what you failed to notice. And it certainly cannot give a photograph soul.

Those things still belong to the photographer.

There is also something to be said for limitations. Photographers often regard limitations as problems to overcome, but I’ve increasingly come to think they can be useful. Limitations force decisions.

One camera. One lens. One focal length. One file format.

Suddenly you stop thinking about possibilities and start looking at what is actually in front of you.

JPEG can be part of that.

Set the camera properly. Trust your meter. Watch your highlights. Pay attention to the light. Press the shutter when something happens.

Move on.

There is a lovely simplicity to it.

Of course, there is an obvious compromise, and I have used it plenty of times:

RAW + JPEG.

It gives you the finished JPEG immediately and keeps the RAW file in reserve.

Perfect, surely?

Well, almost.

Except now you have two files for every photograph, twice the clutter and another excuse never to delete anything.

Photographers are already terrible hoarders. Give us a 4TB hard drive and we will somehow convince ourselves that the 17 nearly identical photographs of a bloke waiting for a bus are historically important.

So these days I prefer to make the decision according to the job.

If the light is difficult, the photograph matters particularly to me, or I expect serious editing or printing, RAW makes sense.

If I am wandering the streets making pictures for pleasure and the light isn’t causing problems, JPEG can be more than enough.

Neither choice makes me a better photographer.

And neither makes anybody else one.

That’s the bit that tends to disappear from these arguments.

A photographer shooting JPEG who understands light, timing and composition will make better pictures than somebody shooting enormous RAW files who understands none of them.

Every time.

The file is not the photograph.

It is simply the container in which the photograph arrives.

After all these years, I have become increasingly suspicious of anything in photography that demands allegiance. I don’t want to join Team RAW or Team JPEG. I don’t particularly want to join Team Nikon, Team Canon, Team Fuji, Team DSLR or Team Mirrorless either.

I want to make photographs.

If RAW helps me make the photograph I want, I’ll use RAW.

If JPEG does the job, I’ll happily use JPEG.

And if somebody tells me that a “serious photographer” must always shoot RAW, I’ll probably smile, nod politely and carry on doing exactly what I’ve been doing for the last 45 years.

Because one of the privileges of becoming an old photographer is discovering how many rules weren’t really rules at all.

They were just opinions repeated loudly enough.

So JPEG or RAW?

Use the one that gets out of your way.

RAW gives you more information.

JPEG gives you more immediacy.

Both can produce wonderful photographs.

Both can produce rubbish.

And when a photograph really works—when the light, moment, expression and instinct all come together—nobody worth worrying about will ask which one you used.

They’ll just look at the picture.

And that, after all, was the whole bloody point.

— Notes from an Old Photographer

The $380 Nikon D850: When Shutter Count Stops Mattering

cameras, Lenses, nikon, opinons, thoughts, photography, pictures, street, Travel

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

Photography as Life: Lessons from 45 Years Behind the Camera: Old Photographer Series

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I have been making pictures for around forty-five years. Put like that, it sounds faintly ridiculous. Forty-five years of carrying cameras, buying cameras, selling cameras, regretting selling cameras, walking miles with cameras that were too heavy, and occasionally wondering why on earth I was still doing it.

And yet I am.

Photography has changed beyond recognition during those years. I started in a world where every press of the shutter cost money. Film had to be bought, processed and printed. You couldn’t look at the back of the camera to see whether you’d got the picture because there was nothing there to look at. You learned to trust the meter, the camera and, eventually, yourself.

Today I can put a memory card into a Nikon D850 and make more photographs in an afternoon than I might once have made in a month.

But strangely, the reason I make pictures hasn’t changed very much at all. I make pictures because I notice things. That may be the simplest explanation I can give.

Photography has trained me to look at the world differently. I notice the old man sitting alone outside a café. I notice the expression on somebody’s face when they think nobody is watching. I notice two people talking across a market stall, a shaft of afternoon light falling across a wall, a child staring curiously at a stranger, the hands of an elderly woman, the tired face of somebody finishing a day’s work.

Most people walk past these things. I stop.

Not always physically. Sometimes the stopping happens entirely inside my head. Something catches my attention and that little photographic instinct, developed over decades, whispers: There’s something there. After forty-five years, that instinct is almost impossible to switch off. I don’t think I would want to.

Photography has become less about cameras as I have grown older. That might sound strange coming from somebody who still enjoys old cameras enormously. I love them. I love the solid lump of a Nikon D700, the wonderful excess of a professional DSLR, the simplicity of a fifty millimeter lens and the satisfying clunk of a proper mechanical shutter.

Old cameras have character. But I know perfectly well that the camera isn’t the reason I go out. The camera gives me an excuse. It gives me permission to wander.

That is one of photography’s great gifts, and perhaps one we don’t talk about enough.

Give an old photographer a camera and suddenly walking around without any particular destination becomes perfectly reasonable. I can disappear down a side street simply because the light looks interesting. I can stand beside a market for twenty minutes watching people come and go. I can sit somewhere with a coffee and watch the theatre of ordinary life unfolding in front of me.

Without the camera, perhaps I would feel I should be going somewhere. With the camera, I already am. And after forty-five years, I have realised that these apparently insignificant wanderings have formed a considerable part of my life.

Thousands upon thousands of little journeys. Some produced photographs I still care about. Many produced absolutely nothing. That doesn’t mean they were wasted.

Because photography has never really been about collecting successful pictures. It is about being present while life is happening. That matters more to me now than it did when I was younger.

When you’re young, photography can become competitive. You want sharper lenses, better cameras, stronger pictures, publication, recognition, compliments. You compare yourself with other photographers. You worry about whether your photographs are good enough.

Age has a useful way of knocking some of that nonsense out of you. I still want to make good pictures. Of course I do. There would be little point otherwise. But I no longer need every photograph to prove something.

That is enormously liberating.

A photograph can simply say: I was here. I saw this. This person existed. This moment mattered to me. That is enough.

Perhaps that is also why pictures of people have always mattered so much to me.

Buildings change. Streets disappear. Shops close. Cars become old-fashioned. Entire neighbourhoods can be transformed almost beyond recognition.

But people make photographs breathe. A face gives a picture its humanity.

When I look through older photographs, it is rarely the technical perfection that interests me. I don’t sit there thinking, Wonderful corner sharpness.

I look at the people. Who were they? What happened to them? Where are they now?

Sometimes I remember everything about making the photograph. The weather. The conversation. The camera I was carrying. The walk home afterwards.

Other times I remember almost nothing. And that is when photography becomes slightly magical. Because the photograph remembers for me. That small rectangle of paper or collection of pixels has preserved something my own memory has lost.

After forty-five years, I increasingly understand that I have not simply been making photographs. I have been building an archive of a life. Not deliberately. Nobody begins photography at twenty or thirty thinking, I shall now document the next forty-five years of my existence. You simply keep taking pictures. One year becomes five. Five becomes twenty.

Then one day you look behind you and realise that the photographs have become breadcrumbs scattered along the road you travelled.

Cameras I once carried. Places where I once stood. People I once knew. People I loved. People I met for thirty seconds and never saw again. Cities before they changed. Streets before they disappeared. And versions of myself that no longer exist.

That is powerful stuff.

It also explains why printing photographs still matters to me. A photograph on a screen exists, certainly, but a print has presence. You can hold it. Put it on a table. Stick it on a wall. Find it unexpectedly twenty years later.

A print becomes an object. And objects survive us in peculiar ways. I sometimes wonder what will happen to all these photographs eventually. Every photographer who has worked long enough probably thinks about it. Will anybody care?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. I’ve become surprisingly comfortable with that.

I didn’t make most of these pictures for an imaginary audience fifty years in the future. I made them because something in front of me made me raise the camera.

That’s enough. Photography has given me something far more valuable than a collection of images. It has given me curiosity.

Even after forty-five years I can walk down a street I have walked down a hundred times and still wonder whether today there might be a photograph there.

That possibility gets me out of the door. And some days, particularly as we get older, getting out of the door is no small thing. The camera provides purpose. Not some grand artistic purpose. Nothing quite so pompous. Just a reason to walk another street. Look around another corner. Talk to another stranger. Wait another five minutes because the light might change. Photography keeps me engaged with the world.

And the world, for all its madness, cruelty, stupidity and noise, remains endlessly interesting when viewed through a camera.

There are still faces I haven’t photographed. Still streets I haven’t walked. Still moments I haven’t seen. And perhaps somewhere tomorrow afternoon there will be one of those tiny combinations of person, expression, gesture and light that lasts for half a second and then disappears forever.

I’ll raise the camera.

Click. Gone. Except it isn’t. I caught a little piece of it.

After forty-five years, I think that is why making pictures remains so important to me.

Photography has been a companion for most of my adult life. Cameras have come and gone. Film became digital. Darkrooms became computers. Thirty-six exposures became memory cards holding thousands. Autofocus became astonishing. Cameras became capable of things we couldn’t have imagined when I started.

None of that is really important. The important part happens before the shutter is pressed. You notice. You care. You decide that this tiny fragment of ordinary life deserves to be remembered.

Then you make the picture.

Forty-five years later, I’m still looking. And I’m still curious about what might be around the next corner. As long as that curiosity remains, I’ll keep carrying a camera. Because somewhere along the way photography stopped being something I did. It became part of the way I live.

And perhaps that is the real privilege of being an old photographer.

You eventually understand that all those years you thought you were making pictures of the world. But quietly, picture by picture, the world was making a photographer out of you.

Nikon D850 + AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G

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One Camera One Lens

The Old Photographer Series

There is a peculiar disease among photographers. I have suffered from it myself for years.

We convince ourselves that we need another lens.

A 24mm for when things get tight. A 35mm because it is supposedly the perfect street lens. A 50mm because everybody ought to own one. An 85mm for portraits. A zoom because changing lenses is inconvenient. And perhaps a telephoto because, well, you never know.

Before long we’re heading out to take photographs carrying enough equipment to document the invasion of a small country.

Then, after walking around all day with several kilos hanging from our shoulders, we get home and discover that most of the pictures were taken with one lens.

Eventually an old photographer begins to see the absurdity of it.

So here is my alternative.

One Nikon D850. One AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G. Nothing else.

Well, perhaps a spare battery.

I’m old, not stupid.

The Nikon D850 is hardly anybody’s idea of a small camera. It is a substantial DSLR, built in that wonderful Nikon tradition of cameras that feel as though they could survive considerably more punishment than their owners.

And I like that.

I’m not looking for a camera that disappears into a jacket pocket. I want something that sits properly in my hands. Something with a real grip, proper buttons and dials, and an optical viewfinder through which I can simply look at the world.

The D850 gives me that, together with a 45.7-megapixel FX sensor capable of producing quite extraordinary files.

But here’s the important bit.

I don’t need to think about any of it.

After enough years using Nikon DSLRs, the controls become familiar. Aperture. Shutter speed. ISO. Focus point. Exposure compensation.

Everything else can largely bugger off.

The camera is there to make photographs.

Then we put the little 50mm f/1.4G on the front.

And suddenly this enormous photographic machine becomes beautifully simple.

The AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G is an interesting lens because it isn’t one of Nikon’s modern optical monsters.

It dates from 2008. It has eight elements in seven groups, weighs only about 280 grams, focuses down to 45cm and uses a nine-bladed rounded diaphragm. Its Silent Wave Motor provides autofocus, while M/A mode allows immediate manual adjustment.

In other words, it is refreshingly ordinary.

And I mean that as a compliment.

On the D850’s FX sensor, 50mm gives us that classic normal perspective. Not dramatically wide. Not compressed like a telephoto.

Just 50mm.

You look. You frame. You photograph. There is nowhere to hide.

Your feet are the zoom

The first thing that happens when you spend an entire day with a prime lens is that you stop thinking about lenses.

At the beginning you might see something and think:

I wish I had the 35mm.

Twenty minutes later:

An 85mm would be handy here.

Ignore it. Keep walking.

Something rather interesting eventually happens. Your brain begins adjusting to 50mm.

You start seeing pictures in 50mm before the camera reaches your eye.

You know roughly what will be in the frame. You know how close you need to get. You begin moving instinctively.

Want the person larger? Walk closer.

Want more environment? Walk backwards.

Can’t walk backwards because there’s a wall behind you?

Good.

Find another photograph.

That limitation is part of the exercise.

Modern photography has become obsessed with eliminating limitations. I increasingly think limitations are good for us. They make us think.

And 50mm makes you participate

This is particularly important when photographing people.

With a long lens, I can stand well away from somebody and photograph them almost anonymously.

With a 50mm, I can’t.

If I want somebody to occupy a significant part of the frame, I have to get reasonably close. I have entered their world. That changes the photograph.

There’s an intimacy to 50mm street photography that I like. I’m not right under someone’s nose, as I might sometimes feel with a very wide lens, but neither am I standing across the road pretending I wasn’t there.

I’m part of the scene.

For the sort of photography I enjoy — people, faces, gestures, little human moments and the environment around them — that feels right.

About that f/1.4

Naturally, the great attraction of this particular 50mm is written around the front of the lens.

1:1.4.

That’s fast.

It means I can keep working when the light begins to disappear. It means I can isolate somebody against a distracting background. And that rounded nine-blade diaphragm can produce very pleasant out-of-focus areas. Nikon itself positions the lens for low-light work, portraits and general photography.

But here’s something I’ve learned. Just because I’ve bought an f/1.4 lens doesn’t mean I have to photograph everything at f/1.4.

There seems to be a modern fascination with obliterating backgrounds.

Eyes sharp. Ears blurred. Nose blurred. Background transformed into expensive-looking soup.

Very impressive.

But sometimes I actually want to know where the person is.

For street photography especially, the background frequently provides the story.

So I’ll happily use this lens at f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6 or f/8.

I want the aperture that makes the photograph work.

Not the aperture that proves what is engraved on the lens barrel.

The D850 will expose your mistakes

There is another reason I like this combination.

The D850 doesn’t flatter sloppy technique.

That enormous resolution records an extraordinary amount of detail, which means that when focus is right and the camera is steady, the results can be beautiful.

But miss focus slightly? You’ll know.

Use a shutter speed that’s a little too slow? You’ll know.

Get lazy with technique? Oh, you’ll definitely know.

And I rather like that.

A camera should occasionally remind the photographer that he is still involved in the process.

The D850 is capable of extraordinary image quality, but it doesn’t magically create good photographs.

Neither does the 50mm f/1.4G.

That’s still my job.

Leave the bloody camera bag at home

This might actually be the most important part.

Don’t put the D850 and 50mm into a bag containing another four lenses.

Because then the temptation remains.

Take the D850. Attach the 50mm. Put a spare battery and memory card in your pocket. Walk out of the door. That’s it.

For the next few hours, 50mm is the only focal length in existence.

It is remarkably liberating. No lens changes. No sensor dust. No wondering whether the photograph might look better at 35mm. No staring into a bag while the interesting human moment happening three meters away disappears forever.

Just photography.

One camera, One lens changes the way you work

The longer you use the combination, the less you notice it. And that’s when things become interesting.

The camera stops being the subject. You start noticing light.

A face appearing through a doorway. Someone sitting alone at a café.

A child running through a shaft of afternoon sunlight. Two people arguing. Someone laughing. A hand resting on a shoulder. A tired face on a bus.

The ordinary theatre of the street. These are the things that matter. Not whether Nikon has released something newer. Not whether another lens resolves another hundred lines on somebody’s laboratory chart. Not whether my autofocus system contains the latest artificial intelligence.

Did I see the picture?

That’s the question.

Could I really live with just this?

Photographically?

Yes.

The D850 and 50mm f/1.4G could cover an astonishing amount of what I enjoy photographing.

Street. Portraits. Environmental portraits. Travel. Documentary work. Family. Night photography. Details. Even landscapes, if I stop believing landscapes must automatically be photographed with wide-angle lenses.

Would there occasionally be photographs I couldn’t make?

Of course. That’s life. I’ve missed photographs while carrying three lenses as well. Usually because I was fiddling with the bloody equipment.

After decades around cameras, perhaps the greatest luxury isn’t owning more equipment. It’s needing less.

When I was younger, another lens represented another possibility. Now I increasingly see it differently. Every additional lens is another decision. And every second spent thinking about equipment is a second I’m not looking at what is happening around me.

So give me the Nikon D850. Put the AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G on it. One battery in the camera. Another in my pocket. An empty memory card. Good walking shoes. And send me out onto the street.

No zoom. No second body. No bag full of alternatives.

If the photograph is too far away, I’ll walk towards it.

If I’m too close, I’ll walk backwards.

And if neither works, I’ll wait for another photograph. Because there is always another photograph. You just have to be looking.

One camera. One lens. One photographer.

After all these years, perhaps that is enough.

Perhaps it always was.

— The Old Photographer Series

Nikon D800 Review: A Classic Camera Still Shines

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The Nikon D800 is one of those cameras that refuses to become obsolete. Released in 2012, it is now well over a decade old, yet in many respects it still competes surprisingly well with much newer cameras. If someone handed me a clean D800 today, I wouldn’t hesitate to take it out for a day’s street photography, portrait work, or landscape photography.

Image quality ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is where the D800 still shines.

Its 36.3-megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor produces files that remain exceptional by modern standards.

Excellent detail.
Wide dynamic range.
Natural colour.
Plenty of room to crop.

At low ISO, it’s difficult to tell the difference between a D800 file and one from many current cameras costing several times more.

For landscape photographers especially, the D800 remains outstanding.

Dynamic range ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Even today, the D800’s dynamic range is among its greatest strengths.

You can recover:

shadows remarkably well
highlights with confidence
subtle tonal transitions

For photographers who like to edit RAW files, it remains an incredibly capable sensor.

High ISO ⭐⭐⭐☆

This is where age begins to show.

ISO 100–1600 is excellent.

ISO 3200 is perfectly usable.

ISO 6400 starts becoming noticeably noisy compared with today’s sensors.

Modern Nikon Z-series cameras have roughly a stop to two stops advantage here.

Autofocus ⭐⭐⭐☆

The 51-point Multi-CAM 3500FX system was superb in 2012.

Today it feels…

reliable
predictable
but not especially clever.

It lacks:

Eye AF
subject recognition
AI tracking
advanced face detection

For wildlife or fast sport it is clearly behind today’s mirrorless cameras.

For portraits, documentary and street photography it still performs very well.

Speed ⭐⭐⭐

4 fps full-frame

5 fps in DX crop

It isn’t a sports camera.

But unless you’re photographing birds or Formula One, it rarely feels limiting.

Build quality ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is classic Nikon.

Magnesium alloy body.

Weather sealing.

Excellent ergonomics.

Buttons exactly where your fingers expect them.

Many photographers still prefer its handling over modern mirrorless cameras.

Battery life ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Outstanding.

Around 900 shots is entirely realistic.

Many users comfortably exceed that.

Mirrorless cameras still struggle to match this.

Viewfinder ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

One of Nikon’s best optical viewfinders.

Bright.

Large.

100% coverage.

If you enjoy actually looking through a camera rather than at a screen, the D800 remains deeply satisfying.

Video ⭐⭐

Video is where it shows its age.

1080p only.

No 4K.

No modern autofocus.

No stabilisation.

For serious video work there are much better options.

Street photography

Interestingly, despite its size, the D800 is still an excellent street camera.

Pair it with:

Nikon 35mm f/2D
Nikon 50mm f/1.8G
Nikon 85mm f/1.8G

and you’ll have image quality that is genuinely world-class.

The downside?

The shutter is louder than modern mirrorless cameras, and the body is considerably heavier.

Compared with modern cameras

The D800 loses on:

autofocus intelligence
video
silent shooting
high ISO
live view performance
weight

It still wins on:

image quality
dynamic range
colour
ergonomics
optical viewfinder
battery life
value for money

Value in 2026

This is perhaps its biggest strength.

Used prices have become extremely attractive, making it one of the best bargains in full-frame photography. If your priority is making photographs rather than owning the latest technology, it delivers extraordinary performance for relatively little money.

Is it still worth buying?

Absolutely—provided it matches the way you shoot.

Choose the D800 if you photograph:

Landscapes
Portraits
Street photography
Documentary work
Architecture
Studio photography
Fine-art photography

Look elsewhere if your main interests are:

Fast wildlife
Professional sports
Heavy video production
Frequent shooting in very dark conditions

Final thoughts

The Nikon D800 has become something of a modern classic. It was revolutionary when it launched, and unlike many cameras of its era, its strengths haven’t faded. The sensor remains superb, the build quality is exceptional, and the photographs it produces still look contemporary.

In Praise of Program Mode: The Setting Too Many Photographers Ignore

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Photography has always had its share of myths. One of the most persistent is the belief that the more control you exercise over your camera, the better photographer you become. Somewhere along the way, Manual mode became a badge of honour. If you weren’t adjusting shutter speed, aperture and ISO yourself, some would have you believe you weren’t taking photography seriously.

I have never bought into that idea. The camera is a tool. Nothing more. If it helps me make the picture I saw in my mind before the moment disappears, then it has done its job. The photograph is what matters—not the mode dial.

For years I have walked the streets with cameras ranging from old Nikon D2Hs bodies to the D700, D300S and D810. They are cameras I know almost instinctively. Yet one of the settings I return to time and again is Program mode. Yes, Program mode.

Mention it in some photography circles and you’ll almost hear the sharp intake of breath. “That’s for beginners,” they’ll say. It isn’t. It’s for photographers who understand that timing often matters more than technical perfection.

Street photography rarely gives you a second chance.

The woman laughing with her friend won’t repeat the gesture because your shutter speed was set too low. The child looking directly into your lens won’t wait while you decide whether f/5.6 or f/8 is the better artistic choice. The old man stepping into the shaft of afternoon light certainly won’t freeze the moment while you adjust your exposure.

Life moves. Your camera should move with it.

Program mode is often misunderstood. People assume the camera makes every decision. It doesn’t. It simply chooses a sensible combination of shutter speed and aperture based on the available light. You still decide almost everything else.

You choose the ISO. You choose the autofocus mode. You choose the metering pattern. You choose white balance. You choose exposure compensation. Most importantly, you choose where to stand, when to press the shutter and why the picture matters in the first place. Those decisions are infinitely more important than whether the aperture happened to be f/4 or f/5.6

One of the great strengths of Nikon’s implementation is Program Shift. Turn the command dial and the camera cycles through different shutter speed and aperture combinations while maintaining exactly the same exposure.

Need a faster shutter speed because someone has started running across the street? One click. Want a wider aperture to soften a distracting background? Another click. The exposure remains correct, but you influence the way the image is made. It is an elegant compromise between automation and creative control.

For street photography, I often pair Program mode with Auto ISO. I set a sensible upper limit—usually ISO 3200 or 6400 depending on the camera—and specify a minimum shutter speed around 1/250 second. If people are moving quickly, I may increase that to 1/500 second.

The result is a camera that quietly manages changing light while I remain focused on people. And people are why I carry a camera.

I have never gone into the street hoping to photograph an aperture.

Photography isn’t a competition to see who can remember the exposure triangle under pressure. It is an attempt to notice something that everyone else walked past.

The expression. The gesture. The hesitation. The connection between strangers.

These moments last fractions of a second. Miss them, and no amount of technical brilliance can bring them back.

Some photographers will argue that Manual mode offers complete consistency. They are absolutely right—in situations where the light remains constant. In a studio, during portrait sessions, or while photographing landscapes at sunrise, Manual mode can be the perfect choice.

But streets are not studios. Clouds move. People step from bright sunlight into deep shade. Buses reflect light. Shop windows throw highlights across faces.

You are constantly adapting. Let the camera shoulder part of that workload.

There is another advantage that rarely gets discussed. Program mode reduces mental fatigue. Every photographer has only so much attention available. Every second spent thinking about exposure is a second not spent watching expressions, anticipating movement or noticing the relationships unfolding around you.

I’d rather spend my concentration reading people than reading the light meter.

The older I become as a photographer, the more I value simplicity.

When I first started, I wanted to control everything. Every dial. Every setting. Every technical variable.

Experience teaches a different lesson. The camera should become almost invisible.

When that happens, photography stops being about operating machinery and starts becoming about observation.

Some of my favourite photographs were made without me remembering what settings I used. I remember the person. I remember the conversation. I remember the smell of the street after rain or the sound of traffic disappearing behind laughter.

Those memories matter. Whether the picture was taken at f/5.6 or f/6.3 does not.

There is an unfortunate culture within photography that equates complexity with skill. It is the same mindset that insists expensive cameras automatically produce better photographs or that only prime lenses create meaningful work.

Reality is much simpler. Good photographers make good photographs because they see. Not because they twist more dials.

Program mode won’t make anyone a better photographer. Neither will Manual mode. Neither will Aperture Priority. The mode dial has never created a memorable photograph. The photographer has.

So if you’ve ignored Program mode because someone once told you it wasn’t “serious,” perhaps it’s time to ignore that advice instead.

Take your camera into the street.

Set it to P.

Use Auto ISO.

Keep an eye on your exposure compensation.

Trust Program Shift when you need it.

Then forget about the camera.

Watch people.

Wait.

Observe.

Because in the end, nobody looking at your photograph will ask what mode you used.

They’ll only ask whether the picture made them feel something.

And that has always been the only setting that truly matters.

The Heartbeat of Street Photography: Capturing Human Stories: an Old Mans thoughts.

cambodia, cameras, homelessness, Lenses, nikon, opinons, thoughts, philanthropy, photography, street, Travel, voluntary

People are the heartbeat of street photography. Strip them away and you are left with architecture, light, geometry, and atmosphere—interesting in their own right, but missing the pulse that turns a photograph into a human story.

Every face carries a lifetime. Every gesture hints at an unseen narrative. A glance between strangers, a tired worker waiting for a bus, a child chasing pigeons through a square, an elderly couple walking hand in hand—these fleeting moments remind us that the ordinary is often extraordinary when we stop long enough to notice it. Street photography is less about places than it is about the lives unfolding within them.

To photograph people well is to acknowledge that every person passing your lens has a history you will never fully know. The camera captures only a fraction of a second, but that fraction can speak about loneliness, joy, determination, humour, resilience, love, or loss. The photograph becomes less about identifying an individual and more about recognising something universal within them.

That is why people matter. They transform a street from a backdrop into a stage where life reveals itself without rehearsal. They provide scale, emotion, tension, and meaning. A perfectly composed street corner is simply a location until someone steps into the frame. In that instant it becomes a story.

Photographing people also demands something from the photographer. It requires patience to wait for the decisive moment, curiosity to notice what others overlook, and courage to stand close enough for life to reveal itself. It asks for empathy rather than judgment. The best street photographers are rarely hunters looking for trophies; they are observers trying to understand the world around them.

Working with people inevitably raises questions of ethics. We photograph strangers without knowing their circumstances, and with that privilege comes responsibility. Respect should always outweigh ego. Every time we press the shutter we should ask ourselves not only Can I make this photograph? but also Why am I making it? A compelling image should never come at the cost of another person’s dignity.

Perhaps that is why street photography remains endlessly fascinating. It is as much an exploration of ourselves as it is of others. The people we choose to photograph reveal what catches our attention, what moves us, what we fear, and what we value. Our portfolios become quiet self-portraits, assembled from the lives of strangers.

After decades of photographing people, I have come to believe that cameras are merely tools for paying attention. The real skill lies in seeing humanity where others see only crowds. Every stranger has the potential to become part of a visual conversation that stretches across countries, cultures, and generations.

The streets will always change. Buildings rise and fall, fashions evolve, cities expand, and technology reshapes the world. Yet people remain the constant. They laugh, argue, wait, dream, work, embrace, mourn, and celebrate. Those timeless human moments are what give street photography its enduring power.

That is why I continue to point my camera towards people. Not because they are subjects to be collected, but because they remind me that photography, at its very best, is an act of witness. Every frame is a small acknowledgement that someone was here, living an ordinary life that, for one brief moment, became worth remembering.

Without people there are streets. With people there are stories. And stories are the reason street photography continues to matter.

Explore Phnom Penh: Photography Beyond Tourist Spots: Guided by Ian Kydd Miller.

cambodia, opinons, thoughts, photography, pictures, street, Travel

Most visitors arrive in Phnom Penh with a checklist. The Royal Palace. The riverside. Central Market. A sunset over the Mekong. They leave believing they have seen the city.

They haven’t.

The Phnom Penh I know rarely appears in travel brochures. It exists in the first light filtering through the corrugated roof of a neighbourhood market, where fishmongers have already been working for hours before tourists have finished breakfast. It is found in the mechanic’s workshop tucked behind a row of crumbling French-era buildings, where sparks shower across the pavement while children weave bicycles between motorbikes. It lives in the quiet conversation between two elderly women outside a coffee stall, in the monk pausing beneath a tamarind tree, and in the patient street vendor who has stood on the same corner every afternoon for twenty years.

This is the Phnom Penh I invite photographers to discover. Not on a whistle-stop tour, but on foot. Slowly. With curiosity.

Photography is often mistaken for a technical pursuit. We spend fortunes on cameras and lenses, arguing over autofocus speeds and megapixels, convinced the next purchase will somehow unlock better photographs. Yet the best images rarely begin with equipment. They begin with observation.

That is the philosophy behind these guided photographic walks. For photographers who take their photography seriously and want to see the guts of the place.

I won’t tell you where to stand to reproduce the postcard everyone else has already made. Instead, I’ll encourage you to look around the corner, to wait another five minutes, to notice the interaction everyone else hurried past. Street photography rewards patience far more than speed.

Over the years, Phnom Penh has become one of Southeast Asia’s most compelling cities to photograph precisely because it refuses to sit still. Every street carries layers of history. Colonial architecture leans against modern glass towers. Buddhist monks drift past construction workers. Luxury SUVs idle beside bicycles held together with wire. The contradictions are endless, and for a photographer, they are irresistible.

Every walk is different because the city writes its own script.

One morning we may spend two hours inside a local market, never venturing more than fifty metres from the entrance. Another day we might wander narrow alleyways where neighbours know one another by name and children still invent games in the street. Sometimes we’ll follow the changing light along the river. Sometimes we’ll stop for coffee simply because the people passing by are more interesting than any destination.

There is no rigid itinerary because photographs cannot be scheduled.

Along the way, we’ll talk about reading a scene before it unfolds, anticipating gestures, recognising good light, approaching strangers respectfully, and understanding the ethics that underpin meaningful street photography. We’ll discuss why some images resonate long after you’ve forgotten where they were taken, while others, technically flawless though they may be, leave no lasting impression.

These walks are suitable whether you’re carrying a professional Nikon, an ageing Canon, a mirrorless camera or simply a mobile phone. Good photography has never belonged exclusively to expensive equipment. It belongs to attentive eyes.

More importantly, these walks aren’t about copying my photographs. They’re about helping you discover your own.

Phnom Penh has given me countless moments over the years. Some arrived in an instant, others only after hours of waiting. The city has taught me that the strongest photographs are rarely found by chasing spectacle. They emerge from ordinary life observed with care and respect.

That is what I hope to share. Not simply where to photograph. But how to see. If you’re looking for a conventional sightseeing tour, there are plenty available.

If you’re looking to experience Phnom Penh through the eyes of someone who has spent years walking its streets, waiting for fleeting moments and quiet stories, then perhaps we should take a walk together.

Bring comfortable shoes. Bring an open mind.

The photographs will take care of themselves.

Contact me if you may be interested in something like this and we can talk.

fusion07.miller@gmail.com Today. For more details.

For a private guided photography tour in Phnom Penh, I’d position it as a premium, personalized experience rather than a budget walking tour. A pricing structure like this is competitive while reflecting your experience:

Tour	Duration	Price (USD)
Introduction to Phnom Penh	2 hours	$45
Street Photography Walk	4 hours	$85
Full-Day Photography Experience	7–8 hours	$150
Sunrise & Market Tour	3 hours	$65
Evening Street Photography	3 hours	$65