[A. G. Maisey]

Rick, that keris budha is archaic. It was found in fields south of Solo in Central Jawa about 20 years ago. I tried to buy it, along with half a dozen other people, but the seller refused to sell into the local community because he reckoned he`d be making too many enemies, so he sold it to a collector in the USA. I love that keris. If it was a woman, I`d leave my wife for it.

Yes, it was cast, and then sculpted and polished.

Getting back to black boxes.
Yeah, I know the D70 is not a top pro camera, and I discussed this with Nikon techos before I bought it. What I was told was that the actual guts of the thing were the same, and that the ---whatever it is that is at the heart of it---chip?----were the same as the pro model, but that the way in which it had been engineered was to a price, so it would not be as robust, or take as much punishment as a pro model.
Since I only bought this camera to do photos at home, off a tripod, and then pack it back into the camera bag, I figured that the extra couple of grand for a pro model would not be money well spent, particularly when, at the time I bought it, models were in the process of change.
I believe that I will continue to use the film cameras for photos taken when moving around, and the D70 for stuff done at home.

Yep, I know that digital is here forever, and, although I hate many things about it, I also realise that there is an up side. Its great for allowing quick sharing of images. There are a lot of good things about it, and I freely admit that a lot of my problems with digital are simply that anything that came along after the horse and cart, I find to be very challenging on a technological level. Bicycles are OK, but automobiles really should be outlawed.

What I mean by "indefinite focus" is that in the old F's you had a split image focus, that is great for precision, especially on closeups. With the D70 you have these gimpy focus zones, which means that effectively you are forced to use the ground glass all the time. Not fast. Not good.In fact, I find the designated focus zones a hinderance rather than a help. Now I mostly ignore them. If I do a cat I take something like 200+ photos, all in one session, all as fast as I can, so the light remains more or less constant. By the time I get to the end of it, my eyes are watering and tired. Never happened with the F's.

I agree:- I should buy new lenses.
However, since I only use the D70 for selling keris pics, and since there`s no real money in this, buying new lens just so I don`t have to stand on a paint tin once in while I see as a waste of money.

I don`t use the D70's metering function, as I prefer incident light readings taken with a Gosson.

With the photoshop work, yeah, I understand what I need to do with the pics I take now, and I can do it pretty quick, and reasonably well, but that time----and its a lot of time when you are processing +200 images---I used to pay a girl to do in the photolab. She earnt about $12 an hour. My time is worth a wee bit more than that.

I woke up to the "remove battery" trick pretty early in the piece. I returned the first D70 I bought, because the first time I changed lens, it got full of dust that showed up in the images.The replacement D70 I have removed the battery each time I change lens, and I no longer have this problem, but the very fact that you need to do this, I find plain ridiculous.

I do realise that some of the things I don`t like about the D70 could be fixed by the spending of money.However, if I subject this expenditure to a cost/benefit analysis, the benefit is not there, for the cost.

Agree that digital is here to stay. I agree there are many pluses to it.I understand that I must continue to use it.

But all this does not mean that I have to like it.