I took some dead batteries, cables, and old power supplies to drop off in the electrical recycling bin at our local supermarket. As I was putting stuff in, I spotted that there was a camera in the bin; a Nikon D3000 SLR body, in apparently good mechanical condition. I nabbed it and took it home.
This camera can’t be powered by USB (what’s more, Mini-USB, yuk). I needed to get hold of a battery, so I ordered one. While that was on its way, I spotted an identical camera body for sale on a local small ads site, advertised as hors service (broken) due to having been dropped and its lens smashed off, for the princely sum of €20, including a battery and charger. I figured that it was likely to be a cheaper source of spare parts than trying to buy them individually, so I bought it. When it arrived it was clear that the lens had indeed been smashed off, however, what was left was the body with the remains of the lens attached. That is, when it was dropped, it had smashed the lens but not the body. All I needed to do was press the lens release button, remove the stub of a lens that remained, and I had a perfectly good camera body. Bonus!
Now that I also had a battery, and a good camera body to compare with, I realised that the first camera’s mirror was stuck in the up position. I could pull it down, but it just popped back up again. Pressing the shutter button showed an error message. A bit of searching led me to a guide on ifixit addressing this exact error. So I removed the bottom plate, freed up the shutter motor cog, added a tiny drop of oil, and voila, another working camera body!
So then I had two camera bodies and no lens. The D3000 is quite old, launched in 2009, and featuring a 10 megapixel APS-C sensor. It’s compatible with Nikon DX lenses (which have a crop factor relative to full-frame cameras) which are readily available second-hand. I’d not really thought about buying a camera for a while (I was into it while a student; I even had a darkroom in my cellar), but the main thing I’ve had photo problems with is taking decent pictures of the amazing mountains around where I live. Phone cameras are usually very wide angle, and zooming in just descends into blurry mush. I didn’t really have a good idea of how long a lens I might want, but I’d read that the stock 18-55mm lens sold with this camera was not much good, so I thought I’d look for something a little longer. I found a nice-looking Sigma 17-70 f2.8-4.5 zoom with a DX mount – this is a relatively fast lens for its size and price at €70.
Unfortunately I didn’t quite do my homework, and discovered the hard way that this lens will not autofocus on a D3000 because it lacks a built-in “HSM” autofocus motor, and the low-end D3000 doesn’t have an in-body AF motor to drive it. Using AF lenses in manual mode is fairly hopeless because the viewfinder view is not big enough to judge focus well, there’s no split prism, and the manual focus ring is quite coarse. So I needed to find a different lens. I put this lens and one of the bodies up for sale.
What this lens had showed me was that 70mm is nowhere near enough for taking pictures of mountains. In fact zoomed in fully, it was almost identical to the magnification of my own eyes, as I recall being the case with uncropped 50mm lenses on film cameras. In looking around for another lens I found someone selling a pair – an original Nikon 18-55 kit lens (as a bonus, the version with vibration reduction), and a Sigma 70–300mm zoom with an autofocus motor. Both lenses for €130. That’s a good deal in its own right, but this was actually a bigger bundle including a Nikon D5000 body, battery, charger, filters, and a nice camera bag. The D5000 is the same age, but a fair bit better than the D3000, adding higher performance, higher resolution, an articulated screen, and rudimentary video support. I suspect this had not sold because the ad misdescribed it as a “Nikon DX” camera. So I bought that. Now I have 3 camera bodies and 3 lenses for a total outlay of about €220. This is getting ridiculous!
To be continued…