Technology’s getting me down today. Here I am trying to upload pictures and it’s just not working. I’ll have to go back and edit later (edit: I did). How wonderful technology is when it actually works. Which right now, it isn’t, for me. And neither did the Nikon N60’s autofocus, at least not 100% of the time. And of course, the time it didn’t work it kind of ruined one of the shots that I thought could have been one of my best on the roll. There were times that I turned off the AF because it wasn’t focusing properly, but that forced me to miss shots as well. Then I thought, oh, well I’m shooting at f/11 so it probably is getting close enough anyway (I was shooting on aperture priority), I’m just not used to the particular way it handles focusing zones, so I didn’t worry about it. And then I got my pictures back.
I know the N60 is an old, obsolete design and newer ones would be better, but this has still put me off autofocus pretty much completely. I don’t need machines doing my thinking for me.
I tried shooting an N65 last Christmas to document the family shindig, and was consistently frustrated with both its autofocus and also the fact that its autoexposure kept blocking my shots claiming insufficient light. Argh! I used an N60 on a road trip last year, though, and it did great — but there was tons of good light that day.
If only I could override the DX encoding, but there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing that without swapping out canisters. I’m sure Portra 400 would be fine in this camera, but what if you use a small brand with no DX? And yeah, even after that, there is still the problem with autofocus.