I wonder if the ground state of the photographer is ‘dissatisfied’. When I bought a D100 two years ago I loved it. But it didn’t take long for disenchantment to set in; the frame buffer was too small, I couldn’t use old (and wonderful) manual focus lenses on it, digital noise was horrid at high speeds, white balance was dodgy and it didn’t feel as good in the hand as my F100.

Some problems could be alleviated by shooting in RAW mode and ‘developing’ the images with Photoshop, but for all Photoshop’s undoubted excellence, this is awfully labour intensive.

So, when I went to EuroOSCON this year, I left the digital camera at home, taking the F100 instead. Amsterdam has an excellent pro lab which did dev and scan, so I managed to have several of my photos online before the conference was over.

While we were there, Apple announced Aperture, their new pro photographers’ workflow tool. Like James Duncan Davidson, the official photographer, I was excited by the announcement. According to the information on the website, it addressed most of what pissed us off about other tools for managing photos. I think James placed his order that day.

Then, at the beginning of November, Nikon announced a replacement for the D100: the D200. As with Aperture, its list of features seemed to have been specifically written to address all my annoyances with the D100.

I ordered a D200 couple of weeks ago, and Aperture last night. Right now I’m in an excited state. Hopefully, once the kit arrives I’ll manage to stay here for a while. Until the next shiny new thing comes along…