NIKON D80
Photographs by Maurice Mattei

I bought a Nikon D80 because I needed to have a digital SLR to do commercial work. What initially surprised me about the camera was the cost. My prior camera had been a used, $200 Nikon FE. The D80, including the lens, came to about $1400 or so. I thought this was an absurd price. Fortunately, the camera did pay for itself and I also used it as a tax deduction. All's well that ends well.

A second aspect of this camera that I found annoying were the amount of options it offered in its operating system. I read the instructions and tried to avoid all the superfluous settings by adjusting it to be as much like my old FE as possible. Essentially, this means that I set it on manual.

I bought the D80 in 2007 and I'm still not entirely comfortable with it. Digital technology, regardless of the many conveniences, has certain qualities that I find disturbing - not the least of which is how easily digital images can be altered and manipulated. Other than minor color shifts and slight density changes, none of the pictures here have been subjected to such revisions. 

When not shooting the very occasional commercial job, I would sometimes take the camera on family trips, random drives and a handful of events I attended, among other things. The 50 pictures here are the result. The content is mixed but, in my opinion, they are thematically similiar to the pictures in both the Photo USA series and the Hayden, Virginia series. In a sense, this particular group of photographs might fit nicely between the two.

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© 2012 Maurice Mattei

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