My best friend occasionally goes over to his mother’s place to help with cleaning and other tasks. His father passed away a little while, and the family ends up giving me some of the stuff that they’re working on decluttering. Amongst a collection of watches his mother gave me, I was also given an older Nikon D40. After buying new batteries for it, I realized what I’d been missing. For a while, I’ve been saying that photographers are leaning more into capturing than creating. My primary point here is that I feel like all the decisions are being made for us by cameras, and we, as photographers, are simply going along with them. This is part of what it’s like to use mirrorless cameras — but not really the case with DSLRs.
The Nikon D40 was released in 2006, which is three years before I started The Phoblographer. At the heart is a 6.1MP CCD APS-C sensor with a 1.5x crop factor. Yes, the sensor is a CCD — and that means that if you get the exposure, white balance, and everything else perfectly right in-camera, the image will look absolutely superb. This too can be said about a CMOS sensor. However, there’s something about a CCD sensor that truly resembles older slide film. In fact, you even have to shoot like you’re using older slide film. Anything above ISO 400 will be extremely noisy and probably not worth using at all.
That translates into slower shutter speeds, using a flash, staying still, motion blur, and so on. As far as a digital photography experience goes, this is one of the best dives into the past that embraces a lot of the older film mentality. There are tons of images shot on digital that are very easy to do, but that require a ton of skill to pull off with film. Essentially, you can think of this as a digital film camera with only around 3,000 pixels on the long side of the image. Therefore, it’s essentially like a film scan being put out.
Many years ago, I wrote off DSLRs because I was just so sick of what they were doing. Brands were making the optical viewfinders worse and worse — and I recall being berated by a Canon representative for wanting a better diopter due to legal blindness. When that happened, it wasn’t a nail in the coffin for me — it was all of the nails and the six feet of soil piled on top of it. Somewhere deep in my emotions, I sewed the grave with salt and asked 1,000 Mongolian horsemen to trample the field so that nothing could grow there for 1,000 years. But I also embraced mirrorless cameras differently than most photographers. Most photographers use the exposure preview function of their cameras to get a photograph, and they essentially don’t bother reading the light meter. But I have a constant preview on all my cameras, and I still read the light meter. Essentially, I gained the benefits of being able to see my subject more clearly and the surprise of seeing what the final image would be.
Going back to a DSLR really, truly brings that back even more for me now.
So what’s this like?
- You’re basically just using the center focusing point and hoping that your subject is in focus
- That majorly changes the way that you compose a scene if you’re centering your subject a lot
- Not shooting above ISO 400 means that you need to shoot at a shallower depth of field and a slower shutter speed in low light
- Because the RAW files won’t be as versatile as today’s mirrorless cameras, you need to put more pressure on yourself to get it right in-camera
- You’re more in tune with your own imagination and the way you see the scene than the digital simulation of the world
Most importantly, I shoot photos with a whole lot more intention. Can I do this with a mirrorless camera that has an EVF? Yes, but I still see a digital simulation of what I’m getting. Through an optical viewfinder, you’re not seeing that. You’re staying in tune with the world in front of you and not filtering it. Finally, I’m shooting something that I know I really want to make a photograph of because I’m setting everything carefully. But with an EVF, I’m typically managing a conversation between what the camera can give me and my own wants.
If you’re not understanding what that means, you should pick up a DSLR again and try it for yourself.
With that said, I’m going to echo the words of one of Fujifilm’s Vice Presidents, “If I have to explain it to you, you don’t get it.” The Nikon D40 can be had very cheaply today, why not find out for yourself?
I’m in a complicated professional relationship with DSLRs and cameras these days in a world where the big manufacturers don’t care about photographers like me who actually want to make good still images. Instead, they forget their history and tell us all that what they made in the past is crap in pursuit of meeting capitalistic goals. But every now and again, someone proves how wrong they all are.