See photos made using the Nikon D200 with these lenses:

Nikon D200 Gallery 2006-2008

Thoughts and photos by Michael G. Gordon. You may copy and reproduce these for non-commercial, personal, non-profit or for the purpose of comparison, study, comment (fair-use purposes).

The whole point of an SLR is having more than one lens. The "kit" was a Nikon D200 and 18-70mm zoom lens. I do a lot with that combination. I added a 60 mm f2.8 Micro Nikkor for the ultra-closeups. iAfter that, the 75-300 mm zoom lens, 18-200 mm zoom lens.

Old lenses laying around: a big heavy Nikkor "F" 135mm f2, an equally ancient 50 mm f1.8 prime lens, a Swarovski spotting scope with adapter (1100 mm f14) for the close-up of the eagle, an el-cheapo Cambron 500 mm mirror lens (1980's vintage), a 500 mm f8 "long lens" branded "Five Star", a wobbly old Celestron C90 Maksutov (wooden box variety). I had doubts about all these old lenses but they all work pretty well. I purchased a T-mount from BH Photo (http://www.bhphotovideo.com) and it works just fine on all these old T-mount lenses.

Impressions, compared with other fine Nikon digital (non-SLR) cameras:

It's big and heavy. Much bigger/heavier than the Nikon 8700/5700/5000. In fact, you may wish to keep your smaller camera for casual use.
It's fast. Reportedly, 0.15 seconds from power on to first photo. I've never had to wait on it. No more missed photos waiting for the camera to "boot up" or record its images to memory card.
It's fun (enjoyable). A different kind of fun -- this one is very fast and composes with ease. My other cameras are also fun and better suited for situations where a less conspicuous camera is appropriate.
Battery lasts a long time. No electronic viewfinder to run the battery down.
Stays Awake for a long time. It doesn't go to sleep. No worry that just when your Pulitzer Prize photo opportunity happens your camera has gone to sleep.
Use your existing Nikkor lenses. Maybe not all of them, but it preserves your investment in lenses. Beware -- many Nikon DSLR's are choosey about your old lenses but the D200 seems to take them all except perhaps for fisheyes that require mirror lockup.
Photographs have more "snap" to them. I can guess at many reasons, and I imagine that many reasons exist:

Pixels are bigger (ie, sensor pixels). Catch more light, less noise, pixel-to-pixel contrast changes can be greater.
In-camera image processing options are rather sophisticated.
More pixels!
JPEG compression without chroma subsampling if you wish (big files, but very crisp).

Less chance of inadvertent setting changes. Buttons are not where your hands go. In comparison, I must frequently check my Nikon 5700 or 8700 to make sure the ISO has not changed, the focus mode has not changed, the flash is not on or off. If I hand it to someone, the mere act of doing so changes two or three settings on the 5700/8700 cameras. However, you are also quite a bit less likely to hand your Nikon D200 to someone!

Some technical particulars about the images.

Large, fine JPEG's with "optimization" turned on consume from 4 to 7 megabytes per shot. Normal JPEG consumes 2 to 4 megabytes.
Noise influences file size. Noise is no different than fine detail to the camera and must be recorded. The Nikon D200 is amazingly clean.
Optimized JPEG seems to mean no chroma subsampling -- also known as 1x1, 1x1, 1x1 or 4:4:4. The files are about twice bigger than "normal" JPEG. Note: "normal" does not mean normal quality; it refers (in this context) to chroma subsampling or deliberate fuzziness of color since your eyes have fewer "cones" (color receptors) as compared to "rods" (black and white or brightness). On a typical photo at normal viewing distance, I do not think any human being can visually tell the difference between the two, but if you enlarge them the difference sometimes becomes important.

SEE a pixel map of the difference between the 7 megabyte optimized JPEG and the exact same image as a 2.5 megabyte normal JPEG. This is a 3x enlargement of some tree branches and twigs. Where the colors are exactly the same, the result is white. Where blue "bleeds" over the black twig, the blue will be visible. In fact, since the luminance channel has said the twig is "black", then it doesn't really matter what "color" it is since you won't actually see it and this is why ordinary photos look pretty good until you get real close.

It is a good idea to record everything in best or excellent settings, you can later reduce the size or quality of "good" ones that you want to keep but are not going to publish in a magazine. Some people are fanatical about shooting only RAW (NEF format), but at 16 megabytes a shot, you will soon have a storage problem. Update: Compressed NEF takes about 7 megabytes per shot and preserves 11.5 bits per pixel per color. I shoot everything in compressed NEF nowadays.

Working with the photos

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)

JPEGs can be worked by nearly any photo editor. Keep clearly in mind that each time you open and save a JPEG, you reduce the quality of the image. You should therefore save your originals, maybe on CD-ROM, and if it turns out you did not optimize an image the way you want, copy the original and optimize it a different way, don't just keep optimizing the same image over and over.
Adobe Photoshop. The best known, most versatile and most expensive photo editor. It is also rather difficult to use if you do not have a publishing background or training. It uses a lot of jargon that reflects a heritage of newspaper and publishing industry and is not very accessible to anyone else.
Corel Photo Paint is essentially the same thing at half the price, and while it also has jargon, at least the words are more accessible to ordinary computer users. Some convergence has taken place so that Corel Photo Paint is gradually becoming as obfuscated as Adobe Photoshop.
The Gimp. This is not only free, it is excellent. It is also rather intimidating. You may decide it ought to have some feature, and very likely it does -- but good luck stumbling across it! The best teacher is playing with it. Windows users: Be sure to get the GTK+ toolkit installed first then install The Gimp. It works just fine in Linux or Windows, maybe Mac too.

RAW format.

"Nikon View" can open the NEF file format images. You cannot do a whole lot with Nikon View, but it is okay for color balance and automatic adjustment of what it thinks the color balance ought to be. If you find yourself needing to adjust colors or brightness, it is theoretically quite a lot better to do it with the 12-bit-per-pixel RAW format; then when everything is nice and pretty, then you save a JPEG or whatever.
Nikon Capture is the specified program for opening NEF format files made by the Nikon D200. It is specially made to remember the adjustments you have made, so that if you have to tinker with your file, it starts fresh with the original and re-applies your adjustments to get to the point where you can change those adjustments. In all cases, the final product has really only been touched once and thus is as good as can possibly be. It has some nice features well suited to difficult situations, "D-Lighting" for instance which is not just a gamma adjustment but "dodges" (hence the "D" I suppose) and burns automatically. It is quite remarkable in what it can do with a series of mountain ridges.
Raw Shooter. A free version exists, hard to find, and simply amazing for rapid handling of raw images. The idea is that it shows you low-resolution images, you make adjustments, the adjustments can be pasted across a whole range of thumbnails, and then you can save them as JPEG's for purposes you'd use JPEG's. Most of my photos I keep as JPEG but that's not a good format for editing.
Adobe Photoshop. Very expensive; also the industry standard. I find that most of the things I want to do can be done in the less expensive Photoshop Elements. Unfortunately, most of the filters (adjustments) in Photoshop Elements are 8 bit filters, meaning that once you bring in your photos, you must convert them to 8 bit RGB before you can do things. I use Photoshop Elements to remove barrel distortion and adjust perspective, which it can do in one step reducing deterioration of the image quality.

Organizing photos

I have a very large number of photos. If I called one photo "tulip" then it would duplicate hundreds or thousands of them. When I get a new camera (every 2 to 3 years with the advent of digital cameras, every 10 years when it was film), I need to easily know which tulips are recent. If someone says, "I need photos of this building since it was painted in January 2006", I had better have my photos in date order AND subject.
Many people when they first start out, start simple -- a family reunion simply gets labeled "family reunion". Some years later, you have no idea what was the date, or place, and pretty soon you don't even know what family is in the photos. You die, your heirs discard everything because they have no idea if any of the photos are valuable or special in some way.
The government uses only two storage indexing systems -- subject or date. Everything has a date, so that is one index. Everything has a subject -- but the problem is that your photo may have many subjects in one scene. So it is better to NOT use "subject" as the main or only thing you call a photo. You put the subject on the folder, but each image file should be dated. They actually do have dates hidden inside them but this date (the EXIF or Exposure Information block) might be erased by your image editing program.
Every one of my photos gets dated and named. A little script handles this for me. If the photos are of a particular event, I will create a folder (directory) with the name of the event; but it, in turn, lives under a calendar directory structure. Year at the top, then Month. So, at the top of the images is 2006; inside 2006 is 01 through 12. Inside each of those are all the photos for that month, but if a batch of photos is for an event (picnic, rodeo, trip to California) then it just gets named as such.
Beware American non-computer-friendly date order. If you date your photos "9-3-06" you will soon have a problem. All of the 9's will clump together. It is better to use a date order that makes sense to the computer: 2006-09-03 will be grouped with all of the 2006's, and within 2006's, it will group with the 09's, and so on. You should also use all 4 digits of the year. "06-09-03" could be any of six different dates!

Barrel Distortion comparison. Nikon 8700 (top) vs 18-70 mm (kit lens, bottom) on Nikon d200

This slice of photo is near the bottom of the image frame. Top: Nikon 8700, wide angle setting. Bottom: The Nikon D200 kit lens (18-70mm) not quite at its widest setting (it can go wider than the Nikon 8700). The 18-70mm lens has a flatter field, little or no barrel distortion. I'll get a better example - lakes and seas especially when you point at the sky or down; such that the horizon is not through the middle of the photo.

EXIT