The photo kit used by Tim

The following comments are purely my own opinions based on my experiences of using photographic equipment for the kind of photos I want to take. It may be no use at all to you if you like completely different photos. Further, I am primarily an artistic rather than a technical photographer so I don't know much about the nitty-gritty of technical matters. Rather than attacking or praising kit per se, I'll attempt to comment on particular quirks I hadn't read or known about before finding them out whilst taking photos.

Nikon D70s

Most of my recent photos were taken on a Nikon D70s digital SLR which unfortunately failed after extensive use. I found it a pleasantly transparent tool that let me get on with taking photos and was surprisingly easy to use. It shot a little over 40,000 frames before the mirror return failed; this would require a costly service and since the camera had suffered other damage it didn't seem a worthwhile fix. 40,000 frames is a third more than the rated figure for the body.

Until internal failure retired the camera, it was carried around unprotected in a rucksack on a daily basis, regularly exposed to rain, sun, dust, sand, and talc, and generally used hard. On one occasion it was dropped from a tripod and landed on the side of the lens; the plastic body by the A/M focus lever suffered a small crack but with no obvious effect on camera use. I was hugely impressed that apart from perhaps a slight degradation of the buttons (and breaking the eyepiece surround!) the camera survived three years of heavy amateur use with no loss of functionality until the mirror mechanism failed after 42,000 shots. I reckon this was a good lifespan.

I initially had trouble taking sky photos with the matrix meter, as all my clouds were overexposed. This turned out to be a problem with too much land in the shot. Going to about 10% land has both fixed the metering 'problem' and made the photos look a lot better! This balance seems to work well when the sky is the subject of the photo.

I also initially had trouble adjusting to the small viewfinder image compared to my 35mm cameras. Over time I've evened out my position on this; the large viewfinder image is useful for accurate manual focusing, but the small image seems to make me more critical of composition. Being able to see the whole picture at once helps a great deal.

A generic problem with digital cameras is blowing out the red channel in photos with artificial reds in them (coats, boots, etc). The D70s was not immune to this problem and it was particularly evident when the saturation setting was turned up. This was probably the single greatest cause of ruined photos for me after the obvious technique/composition mess-ups were removed.

On the subject of metering, I expected to use the spot meter a lot but in fact used the matrix meter the vast majority of the time and the central zone meter in preference to the spot on the few non-matrix shots. The matrix meter was, with only a very few exceptions, far better than I am at getting the right exposure.

The D70s made me really enjoy photography and go out and take lots of great photos. I was impressed enough by Nikon's cameras that it was replaced with a D40.

Since various people have asked me why I got a D70s rather than the D50 which was released at the same time, here goes with the three reasons why! Firstly, he D70s has white balance preset adjustments, which the D50 doesn't. Secondly, there's apparently no viewfinder grid on the D50. And finally, the D70s doesn't have a front command dial. A couple of years on, I don't think that missing any of these would be a particular loss for me. Rebalancing non-perfect colours is trivial in post-processing, the viewfinder grid tended in general to make me skew wide-angle photos, and I never use the front command dial.

Other people asked me why I got a D70s rather than a Canon 20D. There's a simple answer - I tried both, and enjoyed the D70s more. The controls were much more intuitive to me on the D70s, and the grip fitted into my hand much more comforably. I picked up the D70s and immediately forgot the camera and got on with having fun taking pictures; I picked up the 20D and found myself considering it as a technical instrument. I would and do keep the D70s in my hand ready to shoot for hours at a time without noticing it, but didn't get the same level of comfort from the 20D.

Nikon D40

The D40 is a recent acquisition, replacing the broken D70s. This section will be expanded as I use it more. Good points so far - very light weight and small size, generally good whitebalance, excellent user interface, spot-on flash metering and whitebalance. Bad points so far - strange matrix meter seems less consistent than the D70s, no lock on SD card door or joypad (see below).

There are many reviews of the D40 on the web already; Ken Rockwell's guide is a comprehensive one and I won't attempt to replicate any of it here. Instead, I'll comment on things I've found which aren't pointed out by other people.

There is no lock for the joypad on the back of the camera. Hence if you have the camera in single-area AF mode, there's a tendency for you to change the area you're using without intending to. Since the joypad sits right under where the ball of my thumb is for normal shooting, this happens to me frequently and I have had to put a 'focus point OK?' check in my thought pattern. This is an unwanted task. Flipside, the joypad is excellent, tactile and positive with a firm 'OK' in the centre.

A real step in the wrong direction compared to the D70s is the poor response of the preset whitebalance function. The D70s could be pointed at almost anything (I don't think I ever found anything it couldn't handle) and just subtracted the colours it saw to create 'white' in other images. The D40 appears to require something very close to a plain card for the preset image, and also seems to need it to be bright and not too far off-white. I had no luck at all getting a preset whitebalance from a white wall next to high-pressure sodium streetlighting, for example. This is a major inconvenience for ambient-light night town shots!

The UI is such a step forward that it notices when it gets things wrong. For example, the one menu that can't be pruned is the retouch menu accessed with 'OK' from the playback screen - on the D70s none of the menus were able to be pruned. The function button doesn't link with the modifier button for, say, whitebalance preset trims - the D70s didn't have a function button. The basic histogram is still green-channel only - but you can get full RGB from the filter retouch menu. As normal, you only notice where the excellence falls down.

The problems the D70s had with blowing out the red channel seem to have been fixed. On the D40 I can set the saturation to enhanced and warm up the whitebalance a bit and reds still seem fine.

I've been asked why I got the D40 rather than the D40x, D80, D200, or D300, all of which were on the market. Having used a D80 I didn't notice any particular benefit from higher resolution which is the only pertinent difference to me of the D40x over the D40. The D80 has less interface control and more dual-use buttons which was something I didn't like in the D70s, and is bigger and more expensive; autofocus on non-AF-S lenses would be nice but I preferred to get a cheaper and lighter camera and buy better lenses. The D200 has a far more detailed interface which is superb to use but it's nearly twice the weight and much larger, and I got tired carrying it all day. For the price of the D300 I could get a D40, a nice lens, and have a holiday to take a few thousand photos, and it has the weight and size penalties of the D200. I don't think I'd get significantly better results from a D200 or D300 even if I enjoyed the user experience more, and I'd carry them less (weight, size) and pamper them more (cost) hence get less chances to take photos.

Nikon versus Canon? I needed to reinvest in lenses anyway for the D40 and AF-S, and will get the new SB-400 flash, so Canon was an option. The killer feature for me was flash exposure, which Nikon has dead-on, Canon doesn't. I also find the Canon user interface confusing after many long attempts to master it. Canons take just as good photos but for me get more in the way of me making those photos. Nikons, for me, are more artistically transparent.

Nikkor AF-S 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 DX

My D70s came with the AF-S 18-70mm DX kit lens and I sold it on after nine months and probably around 8,000 shots. It was an excellent starter lens with enough wideangle and enough telephoto to get a good first taste of the D70s. The main gripe I had with it was that the focus ring and zoom ring were inverted from my other lenses, with the focus next to the camera body. It was sold on and replaced with the 18-55 (see next review) though on the demise of that lens I borrowed an 18-70 from a friend which does feel heavy compared to the 18-55 but has noticeably better ergonomics and the 55-70 range has proved very useful for middle-distance candid portrait event photography.

Nikkor AF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 DX

The D40 came with an 18-55 AF-S lens which was relatively optically slow but very small and light which made it a great companion to the D40. It was a lot of fun to play with, though had noticeable pincushion distortion if you're looking for it. Most of the time, I'm not. It met an untimely end rolling off a customs inspection table at Heathrow, cracking the front focus ring and breaking the autofocus mechanism complete. Optically still fine, operationally not much use any more, alas.

If I was going to criticise, the AF speed felt a little bit on the slower side compared to Canon USM and higher-cost Nikon. Price per unit focus speed, it was still a super lens and if you know and cater for the slight lag it wasn't such an issue. The photos gained from having it with me due to small size and light weight outweighed the odd shot I missed from slow AF.

Nikkor AF-S 35mm f/1.8 DX

Following the 18-55's demise I managed to get in early on the waiting list for Nikon's new 35mm f/1.8 DX lens, and having used it on a daily basis for a few weeks now it's been one of the best buys for a long time. The focal length is perfect for the majority of my daily photography, wide enough to feel intimate but tele enough not to feel on top of my subject or introduce perpective distortion. I love it for portraits, still life, and photographing from the middle of a group. f/1.8 is wonderful to have back again to regain control over depth of field, and with the D40's ability to go to ISO800 without any problem it's a brilliant low-light lens. It's also both small and light, very valuable for everyday carrying, disappearing into my bag and also disappearing in my hands and having a very un-threatening look in terms of the small front glass. Focus is spot-on, AF-S override is easy, images are crisp and colourful, and the barrel distortion some people have pointed out rarely if ever causes me any trouble.

All in all - I've not taken a zoom out with me for weeks now and I think the general quality of my pictures has, if anything, improved. If it wasn't for the long waiting lists that there now are for the lens I'd buy another one tomorrow were this one to get broken.

Canon T70

My first SLR was a second hand Canon T70 bought around 1991 with a Canon 50mm f1.8 lens, to which I soon added a mainstay Canon 28mm f2.8 and a rarely used and optically slow Tamron 70-210mm telephoto. The T70 is notable for a particularly bright and large viewfinder with an excellent focusing screen which makes manual focusing particularly easy. It is a little angular rather than comfortable in the hand compared to my D70s, and the motor-wind is noisy. In the end it was retired due to an erratic shutter release in hot climates which was missing me shots. Given how small, cheap, and light the D40 is I wouldn't go back to film again.

Olympus C60z

My first digital camera was the compact Olympus C60z with an f/2.8-4.8 (I think) lens with focal range equivalent to 38-114mm in 35mm terms. It takes fine pictures as long as it's carefully focused, has low shutter lag for a compact, and importantly for me has an Olympus-branded underwater housing. Pushing it higher than ISO100 gives a lot of noise but when steadied and run at f/2.8 it takes excellent low-light and night shots at longer shutter speeds. It has a fully manual exposure mode but I found it lacking in whitebalance controls - no shade setting, in particular. Underwater it does well at macro and normal shots but isn't so good at wideangle photos. I found myself taking many hundred photos a month on it at which point it started to fall to bits (screws came out, lens cover slide came loose, body got dented and scratched) at which point I replaced it with the D70s for surface use and bought a second C60z as a backup for underwater. It wasn't up to the job of daily use in and taking the hammering I tend to give my cameras.

As an addendum, the C60z and housing work very well indeed for taking on river swims to make snapshots. The strap fits nicely around an arm and tucks behind a shoulder whilst swimming.

Tokina AT-X Pro 12-24mm f/4 DX

This Tokina 12-24mm ultrawide zoom replaced the 18-70mm Nikkor as my everyday lens. I went for the Tokina in preference to the Nikkor lens on the grounds of cost (half the price) and reputedly similar optical quality. Having used it, it seems sharp, minimally distorting, with a slightly stiff zoom and a fairly smooth manual focus. The AF/MF clutch mechanism seems solid and results in a very nicely damped focus ring whose motion I prefer by far to the seemingly undamped Nikkors.

The metal barrel of the lens feels very solidly made, and having dropped it by mistake about three feet with the camera attached onto the side of the filter ring it didn't experience any damage.

I've taken something like 20000 photos with this lens over the last year and a half and have come up with remarkably few issues. It's great for use as a general lens for interiors, most indoor candid work, and for general large outdoor subjects (in particular, weather). I really like it at the 24mm end for portraits as getting closer to the subject makes the photography so much more engaging. The few areas I've wanted a longer focal length have been some portraits (infrequently!) and some shots picking up landscape detail.

The lens gives very noticeable starburst shooting directly into lights, with something like ten even points on the star. I haven't counted exactly, but I really like how it looks and this isn't a downside at all for me. I've had a little bit of flare, minimal ghosting. The flare is quite predictable and can generally either be shaded out, hidden, or used to artistic effect.

Downsides would be the flare sometimes, and the noise and slowness of focusing - it's a lot noisier than the Nikkor 18-70 (SWM) lens as it uses the camera's internal focusing motor, and can take noticeable time to focus if it has to hunt at all. Generally I'm using the lens in noisy social settings or outdoors where focusing noise isn't much of an issue, so it's only a minor gripe from me, and focus speed is only an issue for very fast candid shots. I also now no longer have any AF-S-esque lenses so have forgotten what quiet, fast focusing is like!

Since some people have asked, this lens is also available for the Canon EF mount. I haven't tried it, so I don't know how well it works but I'd assume the optics are the same good quality. I'd personally be more interested in the Canon-branded EF-S 10-22mm ultrawide though!

Epson P-2000

Three problems existed. Firstly, I'd sometimes be in superb locations and find I was stopping taking photos because I was worried about running out of card storage. Secondly, I hate carrying laptops around with me; they're either too fragile for my lifestyle or too heavy to carry. Thirdly, whilst the screen on the back of a digicam is fine for proofing exposure and colour balance, it's no good for admiring photos on in the field.

Thankfully a solution existed - mobile card-reading hard disks with screens! I started off thinking on the lines of the conventional solutions involving iPods and card readers, but seeing the iPod screen made me realise it was no better than that on my D70s; this seems to be poorly discussed in reviews. Google came to my rescue and suggested the Epson P-2000, which is well covered in many reviews (ask google!). I was convinced, bought one, and found it did well at what it was bought for, except for the reflective screen being difficult to see in anything more than heavy shade.

Things the reviews didn't tell me include quite how slow it is to go from basic image view to zoom mode, how slick the slideshow mode with fading between pictures is, and how utterly covetable the device is. I had people from eight to eighty crowding round it on its first outing, and anyone with the money swore they'd go out and buy one. This was a private/family party so fine, but I'm guessing in public that these little things would be a very attractive target for opportunist theft.

Would I buy it again? Possibly not - whilst it's a great toy to use to show off photos I tend to find that I carry enough memory cards for any shoots I do, and the annoyance of the reflective screen makes it useful for proofing only when there's shade available. It's useful mainly for week-long non-laptop trips, which are rare, and for which I could have bought more memory. It's nice to own, but I think more of a toy than a necessity.

Nikkor AF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 G

Note - this lens went on 'permanent loan' to a friend after getting the D40; manual focus is next to impossible for anything but static subjects, which isn't what I bought the lens for. It has now been obsoleted in the Nikon range by a far more expensive VR version. I plan at some point to replace it with the cheap 55-200VR lens.

I bought this lens as almost an impulse buy for eighty nine pounds, new. At that price I figured that if it was a load of junk I'd keep it for occasions where the chances of ruining a lens were high - it was nearly cheap enough to count as disposable. As such, I expected nothing from it.

It wasn't AF-S, hence used the D70s' focus motor, hence was noisy. I was used to this with the Tokina ultrawide, so it wasn't an issue for me. It was also geared to focus pretty slowly, and I reckon I missed perhaps one or two percent of my shots whilst it searched out to infinity and back again before getting a lock. I thought f/5.6 would be painful at 300mm (450mm in 35mm terms), but reality was worse - anything under f/11 at 300mm was very 'soft' focus, and f/11 at 300mm made it a sunny-day-only lens in the UK. I initially thought the softness would look reasonable for portraits, but it just looked out of focus. It's more realistic, everyday, to consider this a 70-200 f/4-4.8 lens

Holding steady for shots just took practise; at first the light lens was a handicap as it didn't have much inertial stability, but with time and a slightly more positive hold on the lens it was quite handholdable at 1/180 s or a little longer at 300mm. The huge bonus was that it was light enough to wander around for an hour holding it with one hand and not notice, and small enough that it didn't attract undue attention. I liked this a lot, as the one time I borrowed a giant 80-200mm f/2.8 it seemed to be an attention magnet and was of millstone-grade mass.

On balance, for 89 quid I was very happy to have a very lightweight snapshot lens which was quite capable, with some care, of having great photos taken with it.

Nikon SB-600

A very competent flash. The point to note, for those concerned about such things, is that it doesn't go back into 'hotshoe' mode when reconnected to a hotshoe if it's been in remote-slave mode. This is most annoying, as it means that the flash doesn't fire when you take a photo! Other than that, the operation is superb and hassle-free. The only reason it's been augmented with an SB400 is size and weight; it will still be relied on when more power or more directional control is wanted.

Nikon SB-400

Light, cheap, small, neat, and works beautifully with iTTL. The only drawback I can find is that if you fire it too frequently at full power the head gets quite hot, but this isn't really supposed to be an events photography flash. If only all kit in this price bracket worked this easily and well I'd have no need for this page. Top job, Nikon, thankyou!

Lumiquest Pocket Bounce

Jolly useful little gadget. What I didn't know until I bought one was that it requires velcro to be stuck on the outside of your flashgun; not a problem if you don't mind your flash looking a bit furry! Another little niggle is that on windy days it behaves like a large wind-trap and can buffet the camera around a lot more than without it on. Don't get me wrong though; I love the softening effect this bounce has, and it is truly pocket-sized to be taken anywhere. Forget home-made solutions, this is worth every penny of the twenty two pounds or so that I paid for it!

Manfrotto 190 CLB

This was bought for weather photography, as a tripod which wouldn't generally be carried around but would live in the back of a van and get pulled out from time to time. In practical terms, it's the right length when closed to fit in a medium sized North Face Base Camp duffel (this is important to me!) for flights, solid enough not to break when leaping in and out of vans being chased by storms, and cheap enough that if it does break I don't mind. The main flaw I found with it was that the leg-adjustment levers were prone to getting grit in them and jamming, but a few (not so gentle) taps and blows cleared them, and taking care not to provoke this problem has stopped it recurring.

Without the central post (removed immediately; extra weight and phaff, and reduced stability) it proved slightly on the low side for looking through the viewfinder (I'm quite tall), but not impossibly so. This was a worthwhile trade for a lower tripod for stability. In strong winds it wasn't anywhere near heavy enough not to get buffeted around for long exposures, but using the foam leg grips to hold it down firmly did the trick.

Two years since buying it I've neither reattached nor missed the central post.

Manfrotto 488 RC2

Cheap and cheerful ballhead. For 65 quid I didn't expect it to be silky smooth, and it wasn't. Since I was using it in conditions where it regularly got covered with flying dust I had specifically gone for a budget ballhead and it proved fine. I didn't need it to do smooth pans, and as long as it was adjustable I didn't care about smoothness - most of the time it was clamped in one position photographing a storm! For this kind of photography I'm glad I didn't spent any more money.

The one problem that arose after a couple of years of regular use was that the split ring retaining the screw in the camera body shoe fell out, and whilst I can still use it fine I have to be careful to not lose the screw if the shoe isn't on either the camera or secured to the top of the ballhead.

Lowepro Stealth Reporter D100 AW

After using the bag regularly for a couple of years I can report that it has worked very well indeed. It's a perfect size for a compact DSLR plus two lenses, a couple of flashes, and various filters, gadgets, pens, cards, and cookies.

Things I liked about it were as follows. The fully-opening lid gives great access to the inside. The front clip is useful to get to the pockets whilst leaving the top compartment zipped up to protect contents. The shoulder-pad on the strap is extremely comfortable. The bag is a perfect size to work from in a slightly crowded van or at a busy event. With the Lowepro logos removed it's fairly discreet. The build quality seems superb, in terms of stitching, fabric, and zips.

Things I didn't like about it were as follows. The zip lid is less useful than expected - only small items (penciles, small lenses) fit through it with any ease. Removing the internal dividers helps a bit with this. The front pocket was shown on the Lowepro site as made for a P2000, but the velcro fastener doesn't do up with a P2000 in the pocket. (Another additional note - the P2000 fits fine upright in its case inside the main compartment)