This afternoon I had a few errands to run, so rather then grab my current rig, the D300 with 12-24mm f4 on it, I took the D80 with a 50mm f1.8 instead. Since one of my errands was to drop off rolls of film shot with the Leica M6ttl on my recent San Francisco trip, I thought it would be a worthwhile experiment to see whether the D80 could be an adequate travel camera.
After all, the task I’m giving the Leica is restricted: ISO to 400, only one focal length (generally 35mm) with a maximum aperture of f2.0, and shoot monochrome. Metering is center weighted. All of that is well within the D80’s performance parameters.
Picking up the D80 after using the Leica and the D300, it strikes me as smaller and lighter than I remember it. Compared to the Leica it is boxier, that is to say, deep rather than shallow and wide. Controls are superior to the Leica with the choice of built in spot metering.
One idea would be to use the D80 and a prime or two as a travel camera instead of the Leica. Or perhaps even switch to a small sensor compact camera for travel, possibly given up on the Leica / film approach.
Can the D80 with a fast prime replace the Leica?
Shooting through sunset, I came back with 69 images- about two rolls of film. Four images worthy of some further processing. Even though I went out thinking that I would try to capture “black and white”, this is the only image that works as black and white. With a device that captures color, I was still drawn to color contrasts. Perhaps next time I’ll change the shooting menu to Monochrome so that the previews show up as black and white. It may also just be that when I have an SLR in my hands I fall back into habit and capture my usual images.
This image is nice enough but it also reflect my DSLR style of tightly composing and using out of focus elements. The rangefinder shooting style is different. I pick subject by focusing and have a looser idea of how the image hangs together because I can see through and around the image area itself.
It’s also very clear that the digital sensor responds very differently to light compared to the film scanner combination. I can get to where I want it to be pretty quickly, especially with the powerful control point adjustments in Nikon Capture NX. But I get the sense that I’m trying to reproduce what film would have done.
Perhaps I would have been better starting with film in the first place. Tomorrow I’l find out what last week in San Francisco looked like to the film at the time.
