New Old Gear

I rarely change camera bodies. I’ve never suffered from GAS, and I’ve had the same kit for almost 20 years. Every camera produced in the last 15 years is basically the same, with the odd step-up in the autofocus performance, or a faster frames-per-second for people who love the sound of a shutter firing quickly so they can pretend they’re pro photographers at the school sports day. Ask them what reciprocity failure means, and they’ll soil themselves instantly.

Anyway, all I require is a reliable camera that shoots 8-megapixel, RAW frames, has a sensor capable of shooting in various lighting conditions and lasts for years under tough daily working conditions. I had this in my trusty Nikon D4, but it was the heaviest bad-boy ever, and the geared tripod heads were taking a battering.

I acquired a mirrorless Nikon Z6ii for video work, and going forward it seemed a logical step to change to mirrorless cameras for everything given their small, light form factor, but I just don’t want to have to spend thousands on new lenses when my full-frame gear is still perfectly good to use for the rest of my career.

So….let me introduce the second-hand Nikon D850. It’s the most advanced DSLR that Nikon ever produced, and incidentally, the last ever new DSLR as they’re converting production to all mirrorless now. It can shoot RAW files of just under 50 megapixels and is compatible with every pre-mirrorless Nikon lens out there. It’s considerably lighter than my old D4, and can produce vastly-reduced size RAW files that won’t break my computer. It’ll shoot 1080p 60fps video as well, so I could use it for that task also at a push. A snip at just under £1400 with about 32K shutter clicks. The shutter in every camera gives up eventually, and my D4 was approaching its recommended replacement cycle of 750K actuations.

The camera has been used on 4 jobs so far, and I’ve found that it seems to have a completely different sense of exposure to my other cameras, with my intuition and experience of knowing what exposure to use in various circumstances being forced to start anew. I shot a sunny apartment on the North Shields Fish Quay, and the lighting conditions freaked me out when I was seeing hugely overexposed results on the iPad I was using. I’ve since experimented in my own house, and got a workflow going which includes updated Lightroom profiles. It seems that the manual Laowa shift lens I use has confused the metering system somehow. I shoot manually anyway, so can adjust things as I go along.

I’ve got a big job tomorrow, so I’ll report back on how things look out of the camera.