My D200 rolled over 50,000 shutter actuations at the rollerderby bout this Saturday.
That's a long time and a lot of pictures. I have some retrospective thoughts to share:
Quality of Art
That comes out to about 10,000 photos per year, of which I keep
decreasingly few photos. Why? In retrospect, each new photo I take
has to compare with an increasingly large archive of past photos. It gets harder to push the technical/composition/meaning triangle as time goes on, and I see little reason to hang on to anything that's not a ringer.
I wish I'd print more of them. One of the parts of digital photography that I dislike is all the time one spends at a desk reviewing work. I think the time party is worse than one to one, which is a lot of overhead to pay. Most other artforms don't have that kind of intermediate step, or it's incredibly short.
Wear and Tear
The camera itself is showing some signs of wear. The rubber grips are delaminating from the body, the eye cup is cracked and regularly falls off. The AF-drive screw is brassed and a little rounded, the aperture arm is gently grooved, dust spots have become a little chronic, the aperture feeler ring tends to stick and there's a few hot pixels even at ISO 400. For a while I treated it quite gingerly carefully packing it in padded bags and only taking it out when I was sure nothing bad was going to happen to it. But (and this was not a watershed moment) one day the dog knocked it off the tripod onto concrete, and to my surprise, it survived. It has a metal frame and dust and splash seals. The marketing wasn't lying: you could probably pound nails with it in a pinch (just don't use the 18-135mm lens as the handle). Now I just roll it in a sweatshirt and throw it in my backpack if I'm not carrying any other photo gear. I think the shutter mechanism will wear out before dings and bumps take any toll.
General Image Quality Thoughts
The most major flaw in the camera: the hot pixel count. It is and was always high and tends to show up in unfortunate, distracting places. My brothers D60, purchased several years later, with the same sensor, has a dark frame that's almost completely dark, while the D200 has a lot of stars in it's night sky.
On a related note, the ISO performance does show the camera to be from relatively early in the DSLR line of evolution. Noise shows up at ISO 400 in a real way and gets worse from there. Can you believe it pegs out at ISO 3200 ("HI 1")? If you read that sentence in 2005, that would have sounded different. I went from cameras that topped out at ISO 400. In real life, I rarely push it beyond ISO 1600 because the noise makes whatever photo is taken so ugly that it's hard to justify using it. It does have better resolution at ISO 3200 than the film equivalent, so it does do gritty dark urban photographs pretty well. The number of times I've done that is really small. The camera sticks out too much to pull off that kind of photography.
The lack of native sharpening has required a lot of fiddling to achieve satisfying results. Something about the image processing algorithm in the camera does not normally yield photos that feel tack-sharp. To get photos to look good on screen, some sharpening always seems to be needed. All my batch processing scripts (via imagemagick) add +1 sharpening to improve things. My Canon and Sony cameras haven't had this problem, and neither have the scans from film. Looking at histograms, the D200 very rarely will produce pure white and pure black in photos, even when it's obvious. I wonder if the same algorithm is at work accross the camera's dynamic range, preventing stark luminescence transitions?
This winter, I switched switched from using the Normal image controls to a custom control that maximized the sharpening. That helped some, but it doesn't seem to be possible to combine that with the desaturated Portrait mode. There does not appear to be a way to get super-sharp photos straight from the camera.
That is, of course, assuming the camera is in focus and not moving. That's a personal flaw i've wrestled with since getting the camera. It's easy to be lazy and let the shutter speed drop beyond the point where you can hold the camera steady. I've realized the vast number of potentially good photos that have been botched by this, and now double the ISO to compensate.
Buttons Buttons Everywhere
The d200 works very hard to let me focus on photography. It is a straight forward PASM camera, no goofball icon modes, and it's very hard to bump buttons or switches and accidentally change settings. This is a subtle point that many other cameras fail to pick up on. The camera should be there for the photographer, no the other way around. There are some less fiddly cameras out there (you know who you are), and a lot of worse offenders. It's almost possible to fly it without lowering it to look at the screen. (You need the screen to change the image processing and noise filter options) The AF switch tends to get bumped to AF-C when I'm especially ham-fisted, and the CF-card door occasionally opens on it's own.
Using autofocus effectively has required a sequence of revelations about how the system works. First, the screw drive AF-D lenses are generally slower focusing than their AF-S/G counterparts. Second, the center focus point works best, it has a plus (+) based sensor while all the others are just vertical lines (|). Thus, it has an edge in the dark and for situations where there isn't much vertical contrast. Next, for things that aren't moving, use the center spot whenever possible. Third, When photographing moving objects, switch to group-AF, and bump to AF-C, and then move the hot AF sensor so that the moving target is likely to cross all the AF points. The system can't predict the focus for what isn't in the frame, and using a group of AF sensors helps overcome twitchy or complex subject that is moving toward the camera quickly. I enabled wrap-around AF sensor selection so I can quickly bump the AF sensor from one side to the other. This is useful for races and rollerderby where the subjects are crossing the frame in both directions: it's easier to get the AF selection if there's only one button push, instead of three. I have been unable to juice better AF-C performance by changing the various menu settings. Whatever changes they invoke seems very subtle and hasn't helped me take better pictures. The last point about focus is that manual focus lenses are almost impossible to focus to perfection. The focus dot will try to help out, but it doesn't have the same granularity that the AF system sees. While I had hoped to use MF lenses more with the D200, I rarely do in practice. Getting a sharp picture with them is just too troublesome.
The directional selector got a lot more compliant and easy to use after the first year. Except for middle click. That has always been awkward to push. I don't even remember what that does.
Lens Combinations
My bag of lenses has become connected with situations. Sometimes I just put something on and walk out the door, but usually I pick one for the occasion. When first got the camera, I thought I would purchase many lenses. Time, budget, and a realization that great photography doesn't have to happen at the limits of premium glass has meant that the purchase rate has been pretty low. I acquired four AF lenses in quick succession in 2007, then picked up a fifth a few years later. (There's talk of another one or two now, but honestly I'd rather have a motorcycle to take the current lenses around than have another lens and no motorcycle.)
I've learned that taking good portraits with anything less than a 50mm lens is very hard, due to the close distance it puts between the photographer and the subject. At short focal lengths, I feel like I am really in the subjects personal space. It can be a little intense. The photos get an intimate feeling because it's obvious that I'm invading the subjects space. I can see it. Between 50mm (that would be 75 mm for film and full frame sensors), and 200mm, people relax a little. Beyond that you have to yell for them to hear you. 200mm is actually pretty long for portraits. I get why a lot of portrait photographers have 50-85-100-135mm fast prime sets: that's the range where prosaic portraits tend to occur.
The 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 G Dx kit lens has been the surprise favorite in terms of which lens I actually use. It's optical quality is subpar, it's slow, and it's fragile. I don't take pictures of geometric shapes with this lens because they don't look so geometric in the photo: it distorts. Theoretically a huge loss. However, it's also fairly small and light, covers a wide range of focal lengths, usually focuses without hunting, and is my only wide angle lens. The distortion doesn't matter for organic subjects and there's usually enough sunlight to avoid blurry photos. It's literally traveled all over the world while much of the big expensive glass lenses stayed home. It's now quite full of dust, the mechanics are well warn, and I keep using it.
The best portrait lens has been the 35-70 f/2.8 AF-D. I would not recommend it for DX, however, as the zoom range feels awkward for every other situation. I bought it because I want a fast mid-range zoom, and it turned out to be the wrong lens for the job, but I was too poor and
lazy busy to save up to buy the proper replacement. That said, this one has made some great portraits in crowed rooms. It is possible to get internal flare that washes out photos at certain angles, so I religiously chimp critical photos. to make it's not washed out.
The biggest disappointment has been the 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6. (not 70-300, 75!) While tank tough and very sharp, it has such obvious chromatic aeration that it can become very distracting. Everything in front of the subject gets red highlights, everything behind gets blue. The lens isn't useless by any means, but it has ruined a lot of photos I've wanted to come out well. The most obvious situations are when specular highlights are present (water photos), and when there is a lot of material behind and in front of the focus plane, which makes the color shift very obvious Of course, it's the only lens that's around to shoot wildlife. The key to success with this lens is to avoid foreground clutter and compress or defocus the background to hide the color shifts. Almost every frog picture has been taken with this lens.
The 35mm f/1.8 G DX has been a terrific lens for indoor photography and art. It sucks in light and makes people and subjects look nice and dreamy, isolated from their surroundings. Wide open, the depth of field is so shallow that in a full-face portrati, a subjects nose can be in focus and their eyes will be blurred, so I have to stop down or step back. The razor thin depth of field does blur out the background to the point where it's not distracting. That's why i think it's a good indoor lens. Houses are cluttered and I feel the need to tune out the garbage. This lens is a visual squelch knob for confined spaces. Outside and in bright light, it's your dad's nifty-fifty: what a kit lens used to be until the 80s.
The 80-200mm f/2.8 D has been the money maker. Any lens that weighs 5 lbs and costs $1000 should give back a little. I can't think of a single instance where I charged a fee or I shot more than 1000 photos in a day when that lens wasn't on the camera. It is the only thing in the bag that lets me stand far away and isolate a subject in almost any light. Weddings, dances, concerts, fashion shows, parties, sports (derbyderbyderby). VR lenses let you get sharp photos, but they don't isolate the subject, and they don't help if the subject is moving. This lump is all aperture and zoom. It's also really heavy. Did I mention that? It's not fun to aimlessly wander with the 80-200 over your shoulder: it hurts.This lens sleeps in the bag, but when it comes, out, it means there's going to be a grind.
I have often thought about an ultrawide (the tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 was added to my Adorama cart once or twice), but I have never even seen one...
Fun with Flashes
The built in flash is physically fragile and anemic. The only real use is to trigger a remote flash, particularly in CLS mode. Popping on an SB-800, and cranking the head backwards and up 70 degrees makes for great soft lighting anywhere except a big open room. CLS has a serious range drawback: the slave flash needs to see the master, and that usually means a clear line of sight. Occasionally you can get lucky and bounce a signal. It uses the IR emission from the flash as the data signal, and that reflects a bit differently than the visible light. In busy rooms, the constant movement of people blocking one flash or the other makes the CLS triggering unreliable. I keep wanting to trigger the slave flash from places it can't see the master fire. The weakness is so pronounced that I'm surprised that Nikon has straight out bought pocketwizards and integrated RF signalling into their bodies and flashes. Configuring CLS though the camera menus is also a bit slow and cumbersome... People would freaking love a RF CLS, particularly if the master flash had all the controls easily exposed as a separate interface.
One of my favorite approaches for dances is to set the sb-800 (either on camera or remote) to do a burst of 3 flashes spaced 1/3-1/4 second apart, and drag the shutter through the exposure. It really brings the dance to life, and you avoid the otherwise burnt, head on look that often shows up in dance photos people normally see. This works especially well if you can find a white wall to bounce off, or if you gel the flash to some primary color.
End of Rant
In summary, that's where the camera fits in my creative space, and how I think about it after all this time. At this point, it's probably a retrospective for most of the world, as Nikon has coughed up a couple more generations of SLR body now. Perhaps this will be useful to some who wants a used one, or to provide some frame for you to assess how your camera helps you create your art.
