david_najewicz

I bought an older non-d 35-70 on e-bay, got a great price, but I was quite dissappointed when it arrived to find it had a case of fungus. The seller was clueless about photo equiment, and the lens looked almost pristine other than the fungus. I took it to a local camera repair shop, a local "one man" shop and the owner offered to clean it for $40, so I took him up on it. He did a great job and the lens has been clear for almost two years. It stays on the my D-70 almost all of the time now, this is a great lens.... I would look around to see if you can find a smaller camera shop which may be willing to clean it up for less than a hundred or so.

While I don't have a hockey player in the family....I do have a figure skater.... even more expensive than hockey! Anyway I bought a D-70 about two years ago .... by taking the ASA to 1600 I am able to take some pretty good "action" photo's indoors at various rinks. However I have found that the lighting in ice rinks is variable and never really good. I started with a Nikon 70-210mm F 4 -5.6 , while it was long enough it was too slow and I had to shoot at ~1/150 1/200 (ASA1600)... lots of blurry pictures. I bit the bullet and bought a Nikon 80-200 F2.8 - used for about $600 - well worth it. I can now shoot at about 1/400, of course no flash is allowed at figure skating events so that's as good as it gets. While I have gotten great pictures with my D-70,I think a D-50 with the same lens would had done just as well - in fact the D-50 is supposed to have lower noise at ASA 1600. However a fast tlelephoto lens is essential ( I hear the sigma 80-200 F2.8 is nearly as sharp as the Nikon) Here is a link to my site which has a LOT of figure skating photo's - including some of the US figure skating championships at St Louis earlier this year (the winners of this competiton went on to the winter Olympics). I also think the Cannon SLR's are great - they line up cost and feature wise pretty close to the nikons - people spend a lot of time flaming each other about which is better...but at the end of the day they are both excellent. The real issue is the lenses - once you start investing in the lenses you get "wedded" to one brand. I now have a lot of Nikon lenses - and I will probably buy another nikon digital SLR body in a few years because I have such an investment in lenses.

 

Here is a link to my site:

 

http://ky-sailor.smugmug.com/

 

Hope this helps

 

 

Dave