A new Nikon for the studio

My second camera when I was still in high school was a Nikon F with a 58mm 1.4 lens. That was far enough back that it was before they could get an aperture that wide in a 50mm lens. Since then I had moved through different Nikon film cameras (ending with a Nikon F3) and different lenses. My first DSLR back in 2006 was a Fuji S3 which used Nikon lenses. It still takes beautiful pictures, but had a DX chip and couldn't take my old lenses. Well despite the terrible economy, I broke down and bought the company a Nikon D700. I really did my homework on this one but this camera has more benefits than I had ever expected.

Before I took delivery of the camera, I sent three of my lenses out to John White to be "AI'd". These were the same lenses I had had back in the film days and had the forks that used to catch the meter pin of the old Nikon F (I just couldn't give them up). He converted them for a super reasonable price and did it super quickly. The D700 allows me to enter up to 6 non-CPU lenses in the menu and when you select one of those, the camera can "see" the proper f/stops and meter through the lens. For an old guy like me who spent the first 30 years focusing SLR's and view cameras manually this is fun! I have 3 zoom lenses that I used with the Fuji S3. These went from 15mm - 450mm and did a great job for my clients. Now however, I have an additional 4 prime lenses of 28mm, 50mm, 55mm micro and 105mm. They are sharper than the zooms and working perfectly on the full-frame D700. I am enjoying walking around with a digital camera and a 50mm 1.4 lens so much that I am considering shopping for two more of the older, sharper pre-AI lenses. I'll have John White convert them for that reasonable price, and then have a total of 9 lenses. Wow!

Oh did I forget mention that I bought the MB D10 battery grip and that the camera can shoot 8 full size raw files per second? I think I am sounding like a geek now but this is just too much fun!