Last week was snow here in Georgia, and now this week is the start of the various Lunar New Year celebrations around metro Atlanta.  Hopefully both of those things signal an end to the cold weather.  For Sunday’s outing I thought it would be cool to shoot for fun with some of the older cameras–a Nikon D50 and D40.  Both came out around 2005 or 2006 and can be found on the used market for dirt cheap.  Sometimes for less than the price of a roll of Portra film or pack of Instax.  (Which honestly speaks to the crazy times we are living in with forced scarcity and people really not valuing the right things)  Anyways, both cameras are “ancient” in technology circles, but still very capable when paired with good lenses.  I wish folks would stop likening digital SLR cameras to a box of scraps in a cave.  It’s not like these things are unusable in 2022.

In looking at all my old photos taken from that time, it takes me back.  I was just happy to have a digital SLR back then, with the ability to shoot as much as I wanted to.  Sure the files don’t have as much dynamic range as the newer sensors and the buffer is much like a starter weapon in a videogame with low capacity and long cool down period, but just like the instrument analogy, anything can make sweet sounds in the right hands. Plus that Nikon color right out of camera is still very nice for the things I like to cover in my community.  (If you really want to see bad early digital images, you’ll have to wait for a future post on my collection of really really old digicams)

If you browse back enough on this blog, you’ll see plenty of pictures taken when these cameras were new.  My how time flies, pretty soon this website/blog of mine will be old enough to drink or vote.  In revisiting my old cameras (and also film) I’m really getting back to the simpler days.  The days when there really wasn’t such a popularity contest online.  This format is still pretty much the same as it was back then–here are some photos of what I did today.

Thanks to City Farmers Market Duluth and the Chien Hong Dragon Lion Troupe!