Plastic Fantastic Goes To Work!

Yesterday could have been a hellish time of misery, but I was able to do a lot with the situation. As usual for the summer, we had plans to go to Six Flags; you know...."More flags, more fun"!?! The kids had accumulated enough Accelerated Reader points to earn tickets, so we planned to take them, but this time, we were not only taking our two, but Josh's friend Wyatt as well as his older sister. After looking at the situation, we were going to have 4 kids, so if you add two adults, that number doesn't fit in any of our vehicles! Beside which, the wife had plans to go to a teacher (mostly elementary) store with some of her teacher friends, so I bit the bullet and volunteered to take the kids myself. Me, 4 children between the ages of 6 and 13 at Six Flags over Texas in late July! Hey it only got up to 98! 

What a great opportunity! Time to get out the "Plastic Fantastic", D50 that had arrived last week and have it fulfill it's destiny in camera life. Hazardous, yet need to be physically light, photographic duty. On top of that, I had a very compact, very plastic, and very cheap Tamron 28-200mm zoom that supposedly didn't work which needed to be field tested as well. There you have it, "new" (to me) camera, problematic lens, iffy lighting, fast moving subjects, and adverse conditions.....what could be better!

Let me start by saying that it was an unadulterated joy to carry that sub-two-pound camera/lens combo compared to my usual D300! It's not only light, but much more compact, so that I wasn't constantly worried about slamming it's mass and bulk into something (or someone). This camera fits my hands very well. Although I have smallish hands; I do have rather long fingers, so really small gear feels uncomfortable to me. No, I didn't shoot any Pulizer Prize worthy images, but it (and the lens) did do a creditable job. 

In some semblance of order, lets start with the lens. It's one of the early autofocus "Superzooms", by the inventor of the category, Tamron. A 28-200mm f3.5-5.6, it's generally not considered to be one of the better examples of the type in this day and age. It's also one of the older type that is "screw-drive" vs. ring-motor self-driven that is common today. It was listed by the seller as unable to auto-focus, meaning that it "hunts" and won't lock on to anything. And sure enough, when it showed up, I tried it out on the D70s I had at the time and it had all kinds of trouble locking on anything. I also tried it with the D300 and didn't seem to do much better. So it went into the cabinet for the next 3 months to await my ultimate decision on disposition. Last week, when the D50 arrive, the urge struck me to give it another try since I was still waiting patiently for a "G" spec, Nikkor 28-80mm/f3.3-5.6 appear at the right price on eBay. The upshot was that it actually seemed to lock on subjects with regularity on the D50, so it went to Six Flags yesterday! Well.....guess what......it worked just fine, probably 95% of the time! There were a couple of instances where the subject was dark enough that it couldn't lock on, so I had to switch to manual, but otherwise it was fine. No, it isn't a terribly sharp lens, but it was something like $17 after shipping!

Moving on to the D50 camera itself; all I have to report is that there's nothing to report. It simply did everything it was suppose to do, when it was suppose to do it and how most any photographer would want it done. I LOVE the compact, light easy handling aspects of this body! When I was weighing my options, I had thought about possibly a D40 as well, but in retrospect, I don't think I'd have been as happy with the body that would have been TOO small in my hands, and a control layout that's completely different than the D300 as well as my previous Nikon DSLRs (D70, D70s, D200). All the Nikon DSLRs up until the D40 has had an LCD control panel to the right of the pentaprism housing, where-as the D40 did away with that entirely and moved all those functions to the back LCD. This and the fact that it used a different battery and lacks the capability to focus old "screw-drive" lens would have made it very alien to my system. Sure, I'd have loved for the D50 to use compact flash, but I can live with having a different set of memory cards for all the pluses that it offers me. I'm certain that I'll find other things that'll annoy, me, but for now, I couldn't be happier with this camera!

I returned from Six Flags to find a little box, which contained the "G" spec Nikkor 28-80mm/f3.3-5.6, that I was able to nab on eBay during the weekend for.......$29! And indeed, everything that I had read about it was correct: it is in fact, VERY compact and light. I wished it had arrived early enough for me to take to the amusement park, but even that served the purpose of finding the Tamron to be at least partially working and a now a candidate to be sold for profit. 

The last point I want to touch on today is the comparison between the D300 and the D50. Hopefully the picture can give you some sense of the difference, although it's difficult to tell until you see both together and more importantly to hold them. Sure, the D50 isn't the "baby D3" that the D300 has often been called, but at about five-eights scale and half the carry weight, I think it's going to be great at what I want it to do! They do make a very good match for each other and should work very well as a team.