Photo Equipment

I tend to view photographic equipment as less important than most people, possibly because I have been photographing for so long that I have gone through a lot of equipment. There are some items however that do have a certain quality to them that cannot be ignored.

Cameras

My first really good camera was a Nikon F. I still have one, although I no longer use it. For many years, the Nikon F was considered by many to be the professional's camera. It still just feels good to hold it. The quality of materials and construction is still unsurpassed. I took many pictures with this camera, and a few have even made it into my portfolio. I also have two Nikon F2's, which were also wonderful.

My next big step up was to medium format film, via the Plaubel Makina 67. This was a 6x7 cm. folding rangefinder camera. They haven't been made for quite a while. If you look for one on Ebay, or some used camera store, you'll find them to be quite expensive. They were well loved, for two primary reasons. They were fairly solid cameras, almost all metal and quite heavy, and they had one of the best lenses I have ever used. It was fixed Nikkor 80mm F2.8 lens that had a quality to its images that I haven't been able to match since. Many of my best images were taken with this camera. The major downside to this camera was the fixed lens. I really wanted the lens changing capability of the Nikons. Being limited to a normal lens was painful. Sometimes, I really missed not having a wide angle lens, or a telephoto. So, eventually, I upgraded to....

a Hasselblad C series -- again, a pro workhorse. I still have it and love it. I used a normal 80mm Planar, a 150mm F4 Sonnar telephoto, and a 50mm Distagon wideangle. They are all great lenses, but none of them was as good as the Nikkor on the Plaubel.

I have pretty much retired the Hasselblad, mainly because I have pretty much stopped doing wet darkroom work. I still may use the Hassy and the Plaubel occasionally, and scan in the negatives.

My switch to digital came in the form of a Nikon D200. It's a great camera, but I'm not as happy with it as some of my earlier film cameras. I like the ability to see a picture seconds after it is taken, so I can tell if I need to take another, and I like the freedom of being able to take hundreds of images without wasting film, but I dislike all the menus and buttons and complications. As I mentioned elsewhere, I have been in the software business for many years, and so I'm used to complexity in software, but I find that current camera designers have gone way overboard with "feature creep", adding features and functions that are rarely used, but which complicate the picture taking process. Every time I take a picture with a Digital camera (not just the Nikon), I have a worry in the back of my head that some setting deep in some menu somewhere is wrong and the picture will be bad. With a film camera, there was only shutter speed, aperture, and focus to worry about, and usually they were all easily visible in the viewfinder, or on simple easy-to-see, easy-to-correct dials. My D200 has dozens of menu settings, and numerous buttons. Still, I have switched to digital, and I'm pretty happy with the images that result, but I do think that medium format film camera images have something about them that I love. I would switch to medium format digital if it were affordable, but it's way out of my price range.

My current camara is a Nikon D700. I am quite happy with this camera. The major advantages, to me, over the D200 are the full-size sensor, which means that my lenses focal-lengths work the way I expect them to, and the fact that with such a big sensor, the camera is really good at low-light photography, which I do a lot.

My computer equipment consists of a Mac Pro 2.6ghz with 4 gigabytes of memory, a 23 inch Apple Cinema Display, an Epson R2400 printer, an Epson V700 scanner, and a Wacom Graphire 3 tablet. I find the Mac Pro to be the best computer I have used (and I have been using computers since 1967, when each one filled a room!). The main program that I use to do all my digital photo work is Apple's Aperture (currently Version 3). I find this program to be excellent!