So my Nikon D90 is now in my hands and I’ve been getting to know it over the past week or so.
The camera companies will have us believe that every new camera in a given range will enable the humble photographer behind the lens to take better photographs than he would have done with the model before. Such claims are nothing more than marketing nonsense. At best we could say that the process of taking photographs becomes somewhat easier as technology progresses and the likelihood that a good photograph will emerge from the chaff increases as cameras “improve”. But even this can be debated.
A camera costing £4000 sporting the latest professional-grade lenses will not necessarily reward you with better photographs than a point-and-shoot camera. 24 megapixels will not necessarily give you more striking images than 3 megapixels. Such advantages may give you more options as to that which you can successfully capture but they do not point the camera for you, tell you when to press the shutter button, or get you into those positions in which the opportunity for taking eye-catching photographs occurs.
Obviously cameras, lenses and kit do matter to some extent. If you operate in a certain field of photograhy, be it landscape photography, portraiture or sports photography, for instance, certain professional requirements and expectations are brought to bear on your work. But on the whole, there is always the danger that too much time and money can be spent by those whose photography necessitates no such indulgence on the purchasing of cameras and kit that would still ultimately leave the camera, however expensive it may be, as an inert tool in the photographer’s hands.
I am, of course, as guilty as the next person of being seduced by technology and the latest gadgets. I am not averse to ignoring my own sage advice and thinking “maybe if I had a shiny new Nikon D90 rather than this crappy 4 Megapixel Canon I could create earth-shattering images.” The whole process still, however, essentially comes down to little more than the ability to control exposure through the same handful of technical elements that it always has. Once this is appreciated, the relationship between photographer and camera becomes somewhat subordinated to the relationship between photographer and subject. The camera acts merely as a mediator between the two.
Having said all this, the D90 is by far the most advanced camera I have owned to date. If I was the excuse making type there could be no excuses from hereon in. I got myself a Nikon 18-200mm DX VR lens to go with it. My 12-24mm DX lens came the other day and I am now just waiting for my little Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens to arrive. I should then be as versatile as I would need to be without having to sell a kidney or two to finance further extravagances. We’d all love our lenses to be as fast as they could be, but unfortunately, we don’t all have fifteen hundred quid to splash out on every new lens we buy.
The 18-200mm lens and D90 combination, however, seems to cope perfectly adequately in low light conditions with a little coaxing and a little fill flash carefully applied. Although the camera is said to be usable up to ISO 3200, I like to keep the sensitivity as low as possible in order to give the best possible results. It is thus simply the age-old matter of finding the combination of ISO, shutter speed, aperture value and flash that gives the most favourable results.
I shall continue to put the camera and its lenses through their paces over the coming weeks and shall no doubt continue to post the results somewhere about this site.
