As mentioned, these posts are a chance for me to get my D100 and D200 out, make sure the batteries are charged and there’s a fresh CF memory card waiting to receive photos, and go out and shoot with them old workhorses.

So, this is the first of these posts where I’m actually doing what I said I would do . . . namely, photograph stuff using the old cameras. Unfortunately, I picked a very difficult subject — ice!

Worse, I made a couple of rookie mistakes (didn’t have VR on, didn’t check my speed and ISO settings).

And of the two cameras — the D100 and the D200 — the D100 suffered most. I’m still going to use these, but the next effort will be more representative of what the cameras can do.

One other thing . . . the D100 is a 6MP camera. That means that a full-size photo is ~3000×2000 pixels. The D200 is a 10MP camera (~3400×2300 pixels). In contrast, the D7500 photos are ~5500×3700 pixels. The dimensions are approximate because I’m rounding the numbers.

While it may seem those dimensions are not substantially different, in practice, it makes a lot of difference. For instance, the above photo is 60% of the full-size version. If I do a full-size crop, this is what I get . . .

For them who don’t know, here’s the 1:1 crop from the D7500 (note, I didn’t know I was going to compare the shots, so I didn’t shoot exactly the same area, but I’ll revisit this in future posts) . . .

The point is that there’s a lot more information in shots from the D200 than the D100, and more still in shots from the D7500 than the D200. Anyway, let’s continue . . .

The other thing about this particular day that made shooting difficult is that it was a drab day . . . and as good as the D100 is, it’s a camera from 22 years ago, and its low-light performance is nothing to brag about; ISO 400 is about the highest I can hope to shoot before the photo degrades with noise and loss of details.

Notice the camera does better when the background isn’t as busy. Well, not the camera . . . our eyes can separate details a bit better the less busy a scene. Lots of small details in a sea of small details are a challenge even if looking at a photo from the D7500.

Here’s a shot without a busy background.

That’s another issue with the D100 . . . you can get a magenta fringing in certain situations . . . like the above shot. Honest, I didn’t notice it while processing the photos, probably because I work in a wider color space than sRGB and it becomes more pronounced when output for screen resolution. That’s something that’s easily corrected, but I didn’t do it.

But, you know what? I have Luminar AI . . .

Ain’t modern technology wonderful? Actually, these kinds of photos do well if converted to monochrome.

So, this photo . . .

. . . could be shown in monochrome (which also makes it easier to brighten) . . .

. . . or with the sky replaced . . .

And the same for these . . .

Here’s a monochrome straggler (meaning, the color version isn’t worth sharing) . . .

I know, I know . . . what about the D200? Well, it did a little better, in part because I woke up and checked the camera settings, but also because — as mentioned above — it’s a higher resolution sensor with better low-light performance (and the light got better).

Side Note: one other reason for the poor performance of the D100 is the preview screen. It’s a little over a 1.5″ x 1.5″ relatively low-res screen. At the time — and now — it’s mostly useful to check the composition, but as far as checking if the photo is in focus or blurred, not so useful. When I shot the above, I thought I did OK . . . it wasn’t until I downloaded the files that I got the nasty surprise. Honest, I’ll do better next time.

As I was shooting the two cameras, I tried taking photos from the same location and of the same subjects, but one thing that I could not control was the light; fast-moving clouds would occasionally let some sunshine through, making comparisons between cameras a dicey proposition.

The best comparison is the monochrome shots (I think), so here are the monochrome shots of the D200 photos above.

Once again, the shots against the sky are the better shots for showing the icicles.

Because of the bland sky and shooting something dark against a bright background, the color and monochrome version look nearly identical, but they’re not. You can see it better in these next photos.

OK, one final photo, and we’ll call it done . . .

There is a SmugMug Gallery for the above photos HERE.

Here’s a WP gallery of the above:

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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