I've had
my trusty Nikon D200 for nearly five years.
It's taken close to 45,000 images (some of them quite good). It's
clocked up some 120,000 airmiles. It's got a few scratches on the body and a
speck or two on the sensor. It's time it
went back to Nikon for a little tlc, and to get set up for a few more years of
travel.
My D200
wasn't my first foray into digital photography.
I'd already been using both a Fuji compact and Nikon D70 for a couple of
years, but the D200 was a big stepping stone.
It was, at the time at least, a significant investment but more
importantly it marked my final
transition from film. When I collected my D200, I traded in a big bag of
film-based kit. I had real qualms about
getting rid of my film camera collection, but given that it's main purpose over
the previous couple of years had been occupying cupboard space and gathering
dust it was undoubtedly the right thing to do.
So where
has the D200 been to while it's been in my camera bag.
Port Lockroy, Antarctica |
For
several years it was my main camera, with the D70 lurking in the bottom of the
bag as a spare. During this time it got as
far south as the Antarctic, north to Tromso, east to Beijing and west to Seattle. It's role as main camera meant that it made
it into my bag on any trip where I thought there were likely to be interesting
photo opportunities - but it did miss out on quite a few short trips, and on
work trips, where the itinerary fitted the 'plane-hotel-plane' model.
Black-browed Albatross, Falkland Islands |
In early
2010, having been top dog in my camera bag for two years, the D200 acquired a
serious rival, a D700. This addition
made a big change in how the D200 got used, but it didn't mean that it got
relegated to being just a spare. While I
was carrying the D70 and the D200, I tended to regard the D70 as little more
than a (mosty unused) backup. I carried
the D70 round the Falkland Islands in 2009 simply because I could run it on
standard AA batteries if I wound up somewhere where I couldn't charge the
normal batteries, but hardly used it. This wasn't the fate that has met the
D200.
Polar Bears, Svalbard |
With the
arrival of the D700, the two cameras became a complementary pair. It helped that they used the same memory
cards and the same batteries, but the real bonus was that they had different sensors.
The D200 and D70 have small (DX in Nikon-speak) sensors making them great with
longer lenses, but less versatile with short, wide-angle lenses. The D700 has a full-frame (FX in Nikon)
sensor, which gives fantastic image quality in all light conditions and great
wide-angle images but doesn't have quite the same reach as the D200. This pairing means that I've moved to the
approach, on most days at least, of trying to figure what I'm going to be
during the day, and setting up each camera with an appropriate lens for the
day. Usually this has meant putting a
longer lens on the D200, and a wide-angle zoom on the D700. This double act meant that I can easily swap
between long and wide-angle shooting (and back again) without needing swap
lenses in the back of a dusty landrover, or in a bobbing zodiac, meaning both
faster change-overs and minimising the sensor muck-collecting
opportunities. This means that the D200
can still claim some of the most memorable images in my recent collections - from Svalbard, South Georgia and Sri Lanka.
King Penguins, South Georgia |
As the
D200 (certainly the most heavily used camera I've owned) has started to get
longer in the tooth, I started to think about whether it's time to replace it
and, if so, with what. Nikon have
recently launched the D800, and there are D600 rumours, both with FX sensors,
and the D7000 (with a DX sensor) has has wonderful reviews. Any of these would be great company for the
D700. I've found, since I've been
carrying both D200 and D700, that this DX/FX combination is an ideal one for the mix
of wildlife and landscape photography I like to do.
In the
short term at least, I think I'll be hanging on to the D200. Might revisit the decision when it reaches
100,000 frames.
All the
images in this post were taken with my D200, except one.
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