I have written this with a view of taking the middle ground for those who want to take photos a fair bit better than your average holiday snaps that can be of good enough quality to be acceptable to magazines and provide the images that can be scanned and look reasonable on a web site for example.
CAMERA BODY
The final straw for me using this camera was on the 25th of September 2001 at Prestwick when trying to shoot the first of a pair of American Civil registered A4 Skyhawks,the sun was out when the first one landed but a big wall of cloud was about to cover it up so I panned the aircraft as it taxied by only to find it going blurry in the viewfinder and hear the dreaded zzz,zzz,zzz,zzz as the camera tried to get the Skyhawk in focus without much success,I only managed one decent square on shot of it which is in my April to December 2001 Prestwick photos.
When the second one arrived 15 minutes later I had learned my lesson and knocked the Autofocus off and did it manually this time without any problems but there was no sun on it so it is important when buying a camera to thoroughly check out how good the Autofocus is,it is not much use buying good quality lenses if your camera body isn't up to the task of focussing properly.
My second reason for ditching the F801 is that it had exactly the same shutter and aperture settings as my other camera which is a Nikon F90 and they both had shutter speeds of 1/60th,1/125th,1/250th,1/500th and 1/1000th with aperture settings of F4,F5.6,F8 and F11. In hindsight I should have selected a camera with a bigger range of settings than this to give more flexibility in different light conditions.
My main camera now is my new Nikon F80 and the Nikon F90 is my backup (by the way the F80 is a newer model of camera as the higher number doesn't always signify a newer model) and the F80 has shutters speeds of 1/60th,1/90th,1/125th,1/180th, 1/250th,1/350th,1/500th and 1/750th with aperture settings of F4,F4.8,F5.6,F6.7,F8,F9.5 and F11.The point here is that with a better ranger of settings it gives more options for what to set my camera at when shooting in different levels of light.
Here in Scotland we have quite a poor climate where particularly in winter we can get endless days of cloud and low light levels and spells of bad weather can set in during summer too with the summer of 2001 the worst I have ever seen and June being a record low for sunshine hours.
What I do when shooting with my F80 is when the light is good I select an aperture setting of F9.5 which let's the camera choose the shutter speed accordingly so on moving aircraft (taxiing rather than taking off at full speed) I want at least a 1/180th as a speed below this can cause some blurring and I know that if the sun is out I should get at least this speed or more likely a 1/250th or 1/350th on mainly white schemed aircraft.
If the weather is dull I switch to using shutter speeds and I will usually set to a 1/125th of a second for taxiing aircraft provided that they are not going too fast.Recently at Glasgow there were two Fokker 28's from the Ivory Coast that night stopped and left the following morning when the light was particularly bad (15th March 2002) and with these I had selected a 1/125th on my F80 but noticed that the first one was taxiing quite slowly so I altered to a 1/90th just before it passed me to help give my shots that little bit more brightness so even though the light was poor I managed some reaonable shots of these very rare visitors and both are included in the photopages.
At Prestwick during the early months of this year 2002 I used a 1/180th on quite a few of my photos but before this on my older Nikon F90 I had the choice of either using a 1/125th and risk some blurring (particularly the way Ryanair hammer up and down the taxiways) or go for the next setting up of a 1/250th which had the tendancy of making the shot on the dark side.
I felt that I was also getting caught between shutter speeds when shooting fast moving aircraft as well where a 1/250th was causing a blurred background but a 1/500th would be slightly too dark (unless the sun was fully out) so I am now able to use a 1/380th on my F80 for those shots so when buying your camera I would suggest that you look for the settings range of the Nikon F80 and not the more limited range of the Nikon F90.
To Sum Up
2).Look for a camera with a broad range of shutter and aperture settings (as below).
A normal camera should have the following-
(Shutter speeds) 1/60th,1/125th,1/250th,1/500th,1/1000.
(Aperture settings) F4,F5.6,F8,F11.
Considering a camera with the following settings-
(Shutter speeds) 1/60th,1/90th,1/125th,1/180th,1/250th,1/380th,1/500th,1/750th,1/1000th.
(Aperture settings) F4,F4.8,F5.6,F6.7,F8,F9.5,F11.
LENSES
As with the camera body my suggestions for this are aimed at taking it reasonably serious but without spending vast sums of money on the best gear available so I will talk about the lenses that I currently have and what I use them for.
To get the best results from your photos it is more important to concentrate on your lense choice than on the camera body as there is no point in spending the bulk of your money on a top of the range camera body and then buying cheap lower quality lenses for it as it is the standard of your lenses that determines how good a result you will get from your prints or slides.
The first thing to look for is what "F" number the lenses is as the absolute best ones are F1.8 (you don't see a lot of them about because you could easily buy a car with the amount of money required to get them),next is F2.8 which is usually what serious photographers use such as your Newspaper and magazine shooters and a good second hand zoom lense of this standard would likely set you back at lease £500+ ranging up to a couple of thousand pounds or more.
After this the ratings go from F3.5,F4,F4.5 and F5.6 so looking at lenses in the F3.5 and F4 region should give results that you will be very satisfied with,also one thing to bear in mind is that longer zoom lenses such as a 100mm-300mm will have a higher "F" number than a short lense of say 35mm-75mm.
A small range of lenses to cover different jobs is the ideal situation and I have 4 different ones which all get used regularly,details of what I have are on the "My Camera Gear" page and a link to it can be found on the main menu page and at the bottom of this one,also I have put together a write up on how I use my lenses on the "Using Your Camera" page (a link to this is also to be found below).
I would advise caution if buying an all in one lense of 28mm-300mm as I bought a new Sigma one for £349 and it turned out to be my worst ever buy with camera equipment,the problem was that if the sun wasn't out I would get four noticeable dark corners in my shots and this was because the lense didn't have the optical ability to cover the 28mm-300mm adequately so I traded it against a 35mm-135mm lense.
If you are looking for an all in one lense then the ones to consider are those that you would see photographers at Football matches using on a Tripod at trackside,in other words one with a large diameter lense but these are very expensive so I would suggest buying different sized lenses instead as this additional choice can come in handy in various situations.
To Sum Up
2).Look at a small range of lenses for shooting in different situations,I have 4 different ones and use them all regularly and I have written a page under "Using Your Camera" where I mention what lenses I have and the circumstances that I use them but basically what you need are a short zoom of 28-75mm and a longer one of 70mm-300mm as a minimum to give the flexibility of shooting at different distances,anything over 300mm out and personally I wouldn't bother as you will lose some sharpness of the image by using a 2x converter or a longer zoom.
page.