My Photo Equipment

Not that it is any sort of model but just to explain the uneven quality of my photos.

Back about 2013-14 I bought a Nikon D3100 NIB off ebay with 2 kit lenses. No warranty, and that was a risk but it turned out okay. I should have spent $150-200 more for a store-bought D3200 or D3300 with better sensors and higher ISO. Penny wise and dollar foolish, but that has been my life story; hey, I was raised by people for whom the Great Depression was only yesterday and due to come again real soon.

But the D3100 has been entirely adequate and offers a side benefit that expensive Nikon SLRs do not, and that is the ability to work with old Nikon F mount lenses going back to 1959, whether AI'ed or not. Being a bit of a gearhead I take pleasure out of using a 45 year old lens on my D3100, no adapter needed. Obviously they don't autofocus and the camera won't meter light, but trial and error or the sunny-16 rule work fine. Some portraits made with my mint condition 1974 105 mm f/2.5 bought from a seller in Sedona are like, wow, man.

The build quality of Nikkor lenses made in the 1970s is awesome, not equaled by any other manufacturer at any time, and while the optics of modern autofocus lenses is very good, modern lenses feel like they were sold at Dollar General for $10 new. For those of us who like to feel at one with photography of the past, it is hard to do that holding a plastic toy instead of precision phosphor-bronze and aluminum equipment that was machined on a lathe and intended to last into the 22nd century.

I don't remember when I decided to photograph birds, but it might have been as early as 2013 or 2014. I tried, but the telephoto zoom sold in the kit that went out to a measly 200 mm focal length just wasn't adequate. On Craigslist I found a 300 mm Nikkor telephoto made about 1974 offered by a former newspaper photographer. Not dirt cheap, but he threw in three teleconverters, two from Nikon that had a combined suggested retail of over $900 back in 1982, and a Bower 2X with full electronic linkage.

That old 300 takes a 72 mm filter and is heavy. It's like carrying a 2 lb telescope around attached to the camera. The focus is stiff, and while the optical quality is good, it takes a wizard to get a decent pic of a moving bird. In 2016 I found a low cost alternative, the 75-300 Nikkor G lens. That lens sells used on ebay and the Goodwill auction site for around $35. The REASON it is cheap is because it has no internal motor and will autofocus only on cameras with a focusing motor that links to the lens. Which are NOT the consumer grade Nikon SLRs.

That's what I've been carrying around, the 75-300 zoom mounted on the Bower teleconverter giving in effect a 600 mm DX telephoto [comparable to a 900 mm on a 35 mm camera or an FX full-size sensor digital!]. It does not autofocus, and I have to set the camera on shutter priority at 1/1000 sec to reduce shake when the lens is hand-held which is most of the time. Because the 2X teleconverter reduces the effective widest aperture to f/6.5 or f/7.5, I have to set the ISO to 1600.

Screw-ups occur when I use another lens and forget to change the settings back. Then there is the problem of focusing with my weird eyes that seem to vary one hour to the next.

An imperfect set-up, but a cheap way to get 600 mm DX.

Posted on April 4, 2018 03:32 AM by thebark