Hefty Is As Hefty Does

And there is nothing - save a dockyard crane - as heavy as an old professional digital camera. The Nikon D1X you see in the heading image is a relic of my first involvement with digital work. I'd just started serving in the Stirling Street shop - the only one at the time - and The management knew that I'd need to get up to speed with digital to be of any use. They sent me to the C.R. Kennedy offices for some rapid training, and Chris Doudakis did an admirable job of showing me what had changed in photography. Bless him, he was good - it stated to make sense after a half hour. The Pentax K20D was the go at that time and their ergonomics and markings were so well thought-out that even the confused could be set right in short time. In retrospect I might well have started my own shooting with one of these at the time and not been at all sad. However, it was also a time when there were a number of ex-press Nikon D1X camera bodies in the second-hand market, and I decided to get one - there were some Nikon autofocus lenses sitting on my daughter's F-601 camera that I could borrow. I purchased a body and a spare battery and staggered off under the load. I had knee joints then and could cope... The camera says it was built by Nikon but I suspect that the same firm that used to make Tiger tanks had a hand in it. It was the most solid item in our house - and the battery charger was in operation day and night - because the battery packs held remarkably little electricity and had to be refilled all the time. The ISO could go to a vast level of 800, though I kept it to the lowest setting. The screen was the size of a postage stamp, and showed about the same colours. The 1 GB CF card ( 1 GB! Science in action! ) plugged in very carefully - but the thing actually worked and was pretty well lightning fast at dance shooting. During the short period of time when your arms could actually hold it up, it functioned very well. And the files looked good. This was digital adolescence mind, so I did not know what to do, but remember that I was coming off the back of using a Hasselblad 500C/M so I did know what good images should eventually look like - and to the credit of Nikon, they were able to deliver. The camera you see was owned by my late friend Warren, and will be going to another friend, Ray Thompson, to fill a slot in his Nikon collection. To its credit, it works - some 15-16 years later. You might not be able to navigate an expensive advertising shoot, but you could fill a weblog column.