Rob, I do understand your preferences, but given your reasoning I have difficulty understanding why you are hanging onto a brace of "bookends" that you say are over complex and too heavy for you to use.
Anyway, enjoy the time with your daughter.
Best
Keith
Keith -
Thanks re. daughter; wish she could bring out her brood too, but one’s at home studying for exams and her Dad will have to play chef (¡he say!) the other still, as far as I know, in Paris.
Bookends. Well, as I have said before, the D200 cost me around the equivalent of 1800 quid in Spain, and was the first such body in Mallorca. I asked a London Nikon specialist last winter, from whom I was buying a lens, for a trade-in value for the D200 and it was a grudging 300 notes! I’m better off keeping it as a ‘just in case’ body. The D700 is all I will ever, AFAIK, require for serious work, whatever that is, and what I’d like is something like an M9 at a tiny fraction of the Leica price. In essence, something that I can carry around as easily as the cellphone but can give real, printable A3+ RAW files. It’s very frustrating to have found some nice abstracts when carrying the cellphone, working on the jpegs and then wishing they were something else!
Well, the ‘bookends’ are obviously no longer too complex because I have wired them to suit my manual mind; but that wasn’t the point of all of this, which I thought was about basic camera design and function as it comes out of the box. In that condition, and with those massive manuals, yes, I still think them far too complicated for comfort if one has the old experience as a yardstick to fine ergonomics and easy use, even for the novice; especially for the novice, when I come to think of it. If these things confuse me, how much more another person with no earlier experience to help him out? Perhaps that’s one of the reasons for the popularity of cellphone cameras and the erosion of cheaper digital camera markets: people really don’t like a complicated life.
Regarding the heavy Nikon stuff: yes, I can manage to cart it around if something special has to be done, but that’s not leaving me open to serendipity, and being as I am, I have great faith in stumbling onto things, even if they turn out to be no more than old dog turds that can break your ankle when baked in the sun; Michael may have come across some such in Mexico, too. I have realised that an old shopping trolley can carry the Gitzo when I remove the cloth shopping bag, and it looks quite elegant, much like a golf buggy thing. But as I say, it’s not something you’d do on spec, as it were.
But all this aside, film is now too expensive for me if there’s no client to carry the costs. Not only is it expensive, but as far as the local sources tell me, I’d now have to post to Barcelona for my E6 service... In fact, my Palma wholesaler, with whom I’ve dealt since ’81, hasn’t seen me for over a year; well before that, his staff levels had been cut to the bone and his stock was almost zero: “I can get it for you from head office in Barcelona next week! If it’s in stock there.” Pretty hard to see much future in film now, sad to say; even the dentists are deserting it for digital X-Rays.
Rob C