Once I sort out the mortgage thing (which requires expenditure to save money, yay), I’ve got a nice short list of material things that I’d love to get my hands on to support my photography.
- Small GPS unit - the Navi GPS looks to be the ticket at under £80. The Nikon D80 doesn’t have GPS support, but continual track logs saved on a SD card + accurate timestamps would let me merge the two data sets (and EXIF supports geo-tagging).
- New PC. My P4 1.7 laptop staggers under the load of RAW editing with the D80. I’d like to keep the laptop for travel (or give it to someone/where that can use it) and get a decent modern box - say a Core2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, half-tera+ of RAID, external archive setup, 22″ display and something in the NVidia 7800+ range. Considering how long the laptop lasted, that should last me quite a while too.
- Lightweight tripod. Manfrotto or similar, probably carbon fibre. The Slingshot I use has a loop that might work for strapping the tripod to the bag.
- A fast, sharp prime for the D80. 50mm?
- A unicorn!
Well, maybe not a unicorn. The upkeep on one of those is probably a bit more than I can afford. Ah well, perhaps by the end of the year I can get the new PC at least.
Just gonna toss this out there, because you know I have to: “Get a Mac.”
:)
As far as the tripods go: I’ve been quite happy with the Bogen Manfrotto line, and recently replaced the one that was stolen during the summer with a nice Wilderness. As far as an honest to god lightweight tripod goes, my eye definitely wanders to the Gitzo line of carbon fibre tripods. I had a chance to handle their Reporter carbon fibre tripod, and it blew me away. Sans-head, it weighs maybe a pound! And yet, despite being lightweight, it’s still remarkably rigid and stable with a full mounted head on top. What it comes down to, though, is that you’re going to triple your price going carbon fibre, plain and simple.
Things to think on :).
After bothering with a prime myself, I definitely second your thoughts on picking up a prime. Nikon’s Nikkor lenses are pretty damned fantastic, and at a quick glance, the 50mm f/1.8D would probably rock your needs quite happily. That said, the D80 has that pesky lens multiplier endemic with dSLRs, so maybe it’d be worth looking at the 35mm f/2D instead? Hmm…
Comment by Nabil — March 19, 2007 @ 21:22
My standard answer - when I can afford one, I’ll think about it :) Need to run Win32 for one application though, unless CCP get their act in gear and provide a native client. A 24″ iMac would be quite nice though, other than the fact that it’s only a NVidia 7300 - perhaps there’ll be a product line refresh (there are certainly enough rumours) that will bring it into the 8xxx series of cards by the time I could afford it. The 3 GB memory cap (in the Apple store) is also strange given the *nix underpinnings of OS X.
The Hive Mind on Ars Technica appears to maintain that the 50mm is the same, regardless of full size or APS-C - it’s just the crop that changes, necessitating manual zooming with one’s feet. Course, I could be misunderstanding.
Comment by cricalix — March 20, 2007 @ 16:58