The Gadget We Miss: The Nikon Coolpix 950 Digital Camera
The first digital camera used professionally by photographer Kyle Cassidy
In a special guest post, noted photographer Kyle Cassidy discusses the first digital camera he used in the studio, the Nikon Coolpix 950, which was released in 1999.
I miss the 1999 Nikon Coolpix 950 camera; not so much for what it is, but for what it was — transformative. There is probably no other camera that influenced my work as much.
In the final years of the 20th century The Future was hurtling towards us at a prodigious rate and I found myself with one foot on each shore awaiting the collision. I was, myself, evolving, from a writer to a storyteller and I was looking for ways to capture the world visually as well as with words. At that point I’d had a number of gallery shows but I realized that the future was going to be different. I was posting images to my Photo-A-Week blog that were being seen by upwards of 20,000 people while I was pretty certain that no more than 400 people had ever seen any print of mine hanging in an art gallery.
At that time I’d begun to document subcultures and experiment with context, photographing people in and out of their personal spaces and studio photography appealed to me because it was easy to isolate people from their surroundings, but studio lighting was a challenge and without a Polaroid, a lot of it was (for me anyway, without a formal studio photography background), a guessing game.
Digital photography was not new at that time, but the concept of professional digital photography was. Nikon had just released the 2.7 megapixel D1 the year before which was marketed to pros and cost $5,000. I’d had a consumer Olympus digital camera and was fascinated with it. The camera’s maximum resolution was 640 x 480 but I saw the writing on the walls.
The 1.9 megapixel Coolpix 950 had a maximum resolution of 1600 x 1200 and, most importantly, it had a flash sync terminal — this meant that it could be connected, albeit by a strange proprietary cord, to a studio flash. This was all the motivation I needed. 1600 x 1200 was large enough to print a 4x6 at 300 dpi. Practical, effective, useful, digital photography had arrived at a reasonable price (about $1,000).
Apart from shooting my own studio projects I took the Coolpix along on assignment mostly because why not? Very quickly afterward I realized that I was often getting home from an event and starting to spool film into developing reels only to discover that someone else had already gotten a photo of the event on the paper’s website. We were still working in terms of hours, but the number of hours you had from leaving wherever to publication was a lot shorter than it had been. After a few months of using it I posted an essay on my blog, to much hooting and derision, saying that film was effectively dead and giving it five years to bleed out.
There were a number of liberating things about the CoolPix 950 — firstly that flash sync terminal which made, for all intents and purposes, experimenting free and instantaneous. Lights could be placed at will, photos taken, examined, lights moved, etc. Secondly, it had a very credible built in macro lens which allowed me to make friends very easily with archaeologists. I was photographing in Egypt when I offered to photograph all the pot shards they’d excavated for their catalog. Thirdly, the camera had a clever twisty back which was much like an optional waist-level-finder but even more useful. You could hold the camera up over your head and see where it was pointed, you could put it low to the ground and twist the screen to easily see what the camera saw.
It also had a number of down-sides, the biggest of which was it’s predatory relationship with batteries — they didn’t last long. The image quality wasn’t exceptional: there was a lot of fringing and distortion, it was extraordinarily slow to focus and somehow in the time that I owned it I never realized that it had multiple jpeg compression settings and it stayed on the default “normal” rather than “fine” resolution. This meant that I got 16 images to an 8 megabyte card.
Two years later Nikon came out with the prosumer D100 DSLR which had a hot-shoe connection by way of which one could attach studio lights (but again with an odd assortment of proprietary devices) I took that on the road and did a wildly successful photography book using what I’d learned from a great deal of experimenting with the CoolPix 950. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a return on investment that equalled those two years.
Kyle Cassidy is a visual artist and writer living in Philadelphia. His most recent book is War Paint: Tattoo Culture and the Armed Forces from Schiffer Books. All photos Copyright Kyle Cassidy unless otherwise noted.
