cocopunk

I spent months deliberating what camera gear I would take on my trip to Japan, so I feel the need to close the loop and talk about what I used.

First off, I bought a Nikon D3400 body to upgrade from my old D5000. It has the same sized sensor (DX, which is not-quite full frame) so the picture quality wouldn’t necessarily change much, but it’s a newer generation of camera, meaning much higher ISO possibilities (i.e. the ability to shoot in low light) and much faster autofocus in general. It has more pixels too, but I’m not really printing anything so the resolution didn’t matter. Most of all, upgrading from 2009 era tech to 2016 just makes it feel better to use. It’s a little smaller and lighter, too. A D3400 costs about $200 on MPB. (MPB is great for used gear; I also sold them the old camera for $50.)

The real hero was the lens. I had used the 18-55mm Nikon kit lens for years (“kit lens” refers to the general purpose lens that comes with the camera), but it isn’t that sharp and doesn’t have a low aperture; in other words it just doesn’t look that good.

My upgrade, at first, was a cheap but good Yongnuo 35mm f2 lens. Very nice! And affordable because it was dented and scratched up. But it’s not good for wide shots, and I knew I’d want wide shots.

So after some searching I ran across a used Sigma 17-70mm f2.8-4 on MPB for surprisingly cheap ($49). This was a stroke of luck; it looked beat to shit because the rubber focus ring fell off but it was apparently working. And goddamn did it work. I fixed the ring with some superglue.

I mean, come on. That looks so much better than… every photo I’ve taken before. I also bit the bullet and subscribed to Adobe so I could process the photos in Lightroom.

I seriously didn’t realize the limitations of my kit lens until I started trying others, and didn’t realize that good lenses aren’t just rich people shit if you put in the work to find used, old, beat-up lenses for cheap. (Because brand new lenses are generally very expensive ‘rich people shit’ if you’re just doing this stuff for fun.)

The lesson for a lot of amateur photographers, I think, is that it’s not the perfect camera that will give you beautiful images; it’s the lens. That can determine so much more about the look of an image than the actual camera.

It’s not a light set up, or small, or subtle, but it is good.