Birthday Toys
Ok, so my birthday was a few days ago and I’m just now getting time to pontificate about it. I got some very cool swag this time around thanks to the wonderful B&H wishlist feature.
From the wife and kids I got a Nikon SB-600 Speedlight (a “flash” to most people) and an MB-D80 battery pack.
The strobe (er “flash”) is just way cool. It has this wireless mode that lets you just set it somewhere off camera and it knows what to do. Back in the day I hardly ever used a strobe on-camera if I could avoid it. Now not only are there no cables, but through the magic of god knows what, all the automatic gobledy-gook works too. Simply amazing.
The battery back was kinda frivolus, but kinda not. I have big hands and the D80 alone never felt quite right. The battery pack adds enough to make the camera feel right, and it makes you feel like it’s an F-series behemoth to boot :).
But wait, that’s not all….
Today I bought my gift for myself. I got the Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S VR DX Zoom-Nikkor (man what a name). It turns out that good old Action Camera got two of these insanly hard to find beasts in last night and I got the second of the two.
I haven’t had the chance to shoot much with it yet, but I’m thrilled to note that it visually appears sharper than the 18-55 kit lens that came with the D80.
All this has made the little D80 into a wrist snapping monster that interestingly just barely wedges into my old Domke F3 bag.
Niiiice.
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