Doc, who seems to have the worst luck with keeping his equipment going, talks about having to rent a D70 after his Coolpix 5700 broke:
I really missed the CoolPix last night. It’s not nearly as responsive or flexible as the D70, has 1 less megapixel, and a UI that may actually be worse; but I can take better pictures with it, mostly because the flip-out viewer allows me to shoot candids from all over the place. I don’t have to heft a contraption the size of a surface-to-air missle launcher up to my eyeball and set off conditioned responses (Smile for the camera!) in the direction it’s pointed.
I have the D70, a camera which I’ve been exceptionally pleased with. It’s lighter than my Nikon 8008s, and can do about everything I want it to do. Best of all, it works with all of the lenses I’ve collected over the years for my film cameras.
What Doc needed to know was that most of the functionality of the D70 isn’t needed on scene, because you can take a photo in Nikon’s NEF RAW format and then adjust the image at leisure later. Also, if you set the camera shutter and aperture to auto, the film speed to 400, the lens to autofocus, and the white balance to auto, it is pretty much point and shoot.
As for stealth mode when taking the pictures, I’m still trying to figure out how Walker Evans snuck(sneaked) a camera under his coat in such a way that no one noticed it, or him, or heard the shutter closing with his famous series of street photos of subway riders. Even if the camera was small, a lens peeping out of a coat is a lens peeping out of a coat. If he could do this successfully, it’s a piece of cake to do something similar with the D70 at a wedding where people are partying and most likely drinking champagne.
Doc may look a little odd at the wedding dressed in a big overcoat, though. In California.