Small cameras are easy to carry and can produce excellent photographs. The 35mm film camera on top, an Olympus XA2, was produced from 1980 to 1986. The digital camera on the bottom, an Olympus TG-5, was made from 2017 to 2020.
Pocket cameras
Squirrel munches on finch food
Most wildlife isn’t fussy about what kind of food it eats. This squirrel is perfectly happy eating seeds marketed as appropriate for finches.
Roofline shadows
Tree shadows decorate the side of a house.
Good photo gear lasts
Though I have a couple of newer cameras, I still sometimes use a Nikon D200 that I bought used a decade ago. It was a good camera then, and it’s a good camera now.
More modern DSLR bodies offer advantages, sure, like higher usable ISO speeds and higher resolution. But this old 10-megapixel camera could capture fine images when it was new — and it still can. Outdoors in daylight (when I tend to take most of my pictures), the D200 pumps out terrific images with plenty of resolution to fill a magazine page or computer screen or wall-size print. It can do just fine in typical home lighting, too, especially with a reasonably fast lens attached, or a more modern one with image stabilization.
I’ve been using a more up-to-date Nikon D5200 for my daily newspaper work for a couple of years now. It’s slightly lighter than the D200, and its 24-megapixel sensor allows me to crop poorly framed images. But it requires AF-S lenses, ones that have focusing motors built in.
The D200 has a focusing motor built into the body, so it works with both the AF-S lenses and with older Nikon autofocus lenses that lack a built-in focus motor. Even better, the D200 works 100 percent with any Nikon-compatible lens all the way back to manual-focus AI lenses that were introduced in 1977. I have a few of those (I’ve owned my 300mm since 1983), and they still come in handy in some situations. The newer but more basic D5200 can mount old AI lenses, but the metering system doesn’t work. The D200 meters perfectly with AI lenses.
Enthusiasts rave about how the Nikon Df was specifically built to work with AI lenses. The Df sells new for close to $3,000, used for $1,600 or more. I bought my D200 refurbished 10 years ago for $300. I’ve recently seen used D200 bodies sell for less than $100. The Df has a full-frame 16-megapixel sensor, so can’t be compared directly to the smaller DX sensor in the D200. But the price puts the Df plain out of reach for me, a working journalist. And the D200 produces images more than big enough for online, newspaper or magazine use.
As long as my D200 keeps on ticking, I plan to keep using it to capture images of the world around me.
A taste of winter
Nights can get pretty cold in northern Michigan. But they have a special beauty.
Mead in Bellaire
Sampled some mead and cider last week in Bellaire, Michigan, at Bee Well Meadery.
Between floor and ceiling
Lake Michigan’s shore in Benzie County is all sand, both on the beach and under the water.
Basement antiques of Boyne City
Dust of decades decorates cans and bottles in a farmhouse basement.
Sidecar in the city
A Russian Ural motorcycle with sidecar parked on Front Street in Traverse City on August 8, 2017. This has twice as many headlights as my car.
Union Street reflections
The rising sun casts window reflections on the Hannah Lay Building on Union Street in downtown Traverse City. July 5, 2017.
The view from Graham Greene Township Park
Graham Greene Township Park fronts West Grand Traverse Bay just north of Peshawbestown in Leelanau County. The tiny picnic area just off highway M-22 features a grassy lawn under towering trees, just steps away from a rocky shoreline.
Jeeping south of Traverse City
The woods around Traverse City, particularly to the south, are crisscrossed with a network of two-tracks that lead to pleasant meadows, abandoned old building sites, lakes creeks and forests.
True Traverse City 