Comments(0) Today Nikon has released an update to the D300 firmware.
Looking at the changes this might not be a critical update for everyone. The only modification listed is “An issue that, in rare cases, caused vertical bands (lines) to appear in images captured at shutter speeds slower than 8s has been resolved.”
Still, it might not hurt to upgrade.
Comments(3) Here’s an interesting observation. Under otherwise identical settings, autofocus feels much faster and reliable with a faster lens. Sounds embarrassingly obvious, right? But I think it’s something a lot of people do not take into account when buying lenses!
I did some experiments with the Nikon D300 (which has a very fast and accurate autofocus system – 51 points, different tracking modes, the works) and two great lenses of different maximum aperture (which is conversationally called “speed” for lenses). The f/2.8 lens not only allows you faster shutter speeds compared to an f/5.6, it also does a better job at quickly acquiring correct focus.
I used a Nikon AF-S 80-200mm f/2.8D and a Nikon AF-S DX VR 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED for comparison. Both are AF-S lenses with fast focus motor built into the lens. I used both at 200mm, focussing on the same sequence of subjects from about 10 feet away to several hundred feet away in otherwise identical circumstances. Lighting was reasonable but not extremely bright (ISO 200, f/2.8, 1/60s-1/125s, depending on the subject).
While I wasn’t able to use a stop watch to get absolute times (not enough hands, I guess), there’s a noticeable difference in the time it took the camera to be in focus. It’s hard to put a ratio to it, but my guess would be somewhere between 50% and 200% slower on the f/5.6, depending on the subject. There’s also a more than twice as high likelihood that the first attempt at focus is incorrect (the camera thinks it acquired focus, but it actually didn’t). I did 20 attempts switching between subjects close by and further away; I twice had to refocus with the f/2.8 lens, five times(!) with the f/5.6 lens.
The explanation seems easy enough. Focus acquisition is always at maximum aperture – so the f/2.8 lens gets four times the amount of light to the sensor than the f/5.6 lens. And that clearly makes a lot of difference.
Don’t get me wrong, the 18-200 is a wonderful all-round lens (I bought it explicitly to take with me when going to a park or doing something else in bright sunlight); I was simply curious to see if there was a downside to the reduced amount of light available when focusing. And it turns out there is.
Comments(4) It’s one of the things that I like about the D300: the built-in flash can trigger an external flash like the SB-800 or the SB-600 without any need for additional equipment. But having used this option quite a bit for the past month I also learned about a couple of its downsides.
For one thing, the D300 really slows down the shooting frequency when you use the built-in flash. No Continuous shooting mode (only the first picture gets a flash), and even in Single shot mode there’s a noticeable delay between pictures; I use the battery grip so the cycle time shouldn’t be that long – my guess is this is all trying to prevent over-heating of the flash.
The second downside is kind of obvious. You always have the frontal flash as part of the picture composition. Yes, via the menu that controls the CLS settings for the flash you can tell the camera to underexpose the built-in flash and to compensate by over-exposing the secondary flash, but this seems more like a kludge to me.
I looked at PocketWizards but find them a bit too expensive for my liking. I also looked at the Gadget Infinity wireless trigger that keeps getting mentioned on Strobist (btw: one of the best sites out there about off-camera flash photography). But the more I read the more I wonder about their reliability.
I can’t wait to see reviews of the RadioPopper. Sounds almost too good to be true. So far this seems to hit the sweet spot of price and functionality. But now they actually need to deliver that in real life.
In the meantime I’ve done a few shots with a cable based off-camera flash setup (using HH cable and a hot-shoe adapter, both left over from my experiments with the Rebel XT; on the D300 with an SB-800 one could of course simply use a PC cable), but frankly that’s just way more trouble than it’s worth. So I will get one of the wireless solutions at some point; I guess after the RadioPoppers ship and have been reviewed.
Comments(0) The very positive comments on the D300′s dynamic range were one of the reasons why I ended up buying it. And so far I have been thrilled with the results. The amount of details it preserves both in highlights and in dark areas is very impressive. Especially at higher ISO values.
Today I found an article at KammaGamma that did some much more scientific analysis of the dynamic range of the D300, comparing it directly to the D200. They don’t have similar tests for the Rebel XT or the 40D, but if you use the Comparometer at imaging resource you can actually look at full size high ISO pictures taken under identical conditions with the D300, the 40D and the Rebel XTi (they have some pictures for the Rebel XT as well, but not the high ISO ones). Once again, very impressive results – clearly showing the improved dynamic range, especially at higher ISO settings.
But the most amazing article comparing the current crop of Canon and Nikon DSLRs that I’ve seen so far is this review at Luminous Landscape. It’s long, but it gives so many insights and details that in my mind it is really worth a read.
Comments(3) I love the D300 for low light photography without a flash – but of course flexibility to drive a flash or external strobe light is an important feature for a DSLR. And studying the manuals pointed me to two other advantages that the D300 has compared to the 40D.
Since I really like to experiment with different flash settings and especially off-camera flash (more on that later) I think those are two major drawbacks of the 40D.
Update: As Ryan pointed out in the comment below, this may not be correct after all! While the documentation of the 40D doesn’t mention it (at least not that I could find it, and I spent a bit of time with the PDF and the search function of Acrobat Reader), it appears that you can make it do the long-pulse fast shutter sync up to 1/8000s, just like the D300, assuming you have the 580EX-II flash. As for the PC sync speed, Ryan doesn’t know for sure, either, but believes that it can do 1/250s as wel. I’d love to hear from people who have tried that…
Comments(0) I’ve had my Nikon D300 for about two weeks now, have taken more than 2000 pictures with it and must say that I love it.
It’s very fast – whatever you do; you never feel like you are using a digital camera (which always has this assumption of the horrible delays of the early models – I remember my first digital camera that had something like a one second shutter delay – the D300 has 45 milliseconds). The autofocus is not perfect – especially in low light and with fast moving subjects – but it is amazing compared to anything that I’ve used before. I shoot in “continuos low” mode at 3fps most of the time “continuos servo AF” and “3D tracking”. And even if a few frames in the series are not perfectly in focus (and since this is indoors without a flash and a 1.4 aperture, the moment the focus isn’t 100% perfect, it’s out of focus), the vast majority of the pictures are in focus. Which is just awesome.
As I expected, Auto-ISO mode is a real killer-feature; the D300 ensures that my shutter times don’t get to slow and pushes up the ISO value instead. And even at ISO1600 there is very little noise – it shows a lot more at ISO3200 and HI-1 (i.e., ISO6400), but the pictures are still usable. Some post-processing noise cancellation in photoshop usually gets them to a point where I can use them online and even make decent prints.
I am still struggling with “which control wheel controls what” – many of the functions require you to hold a button and turn one of the two wheels (whether it’s changing the mode from P to A to S to M, shifting the aperture/time combination in P mode, selecting the aperture in A more or the shutter speed in S more, compensating exposure, yet name it). And somehow my brain (and my fingers) haven’t learned which wheel to use for what. Maybe I’m just slow, maybe it’s unintuitive – the jury is still out.
But overall – simply an amazing camera. An amazing step up from the Canon Rebel XT.
I’m planning to post more on what works and tips and tricks over the next few weeks – stay tuned.
Comments(10) Once you spend an obscene amount of money for a camera, the next question of course is what lens (or more likely, which lenses) to get.
The easiest solution might seem to be to get the so-called “kit lens” that Nikon offers together with the camera (interestingly, that’s a different lens in different parts of the world). But in general I am not a big fan of these kit lenses. Yes, the incremental cost is low and they look pretty decent on paper. But these lenses usually are more determined by MBAs than by photographers. And remember, the lens determines the quality of the pictures as much as the camera.
The other extreme appear to be the people who state that as a rule of thumb you should spend about as much money on your every-day lens as you spent on the camera. Given the price of the D300 that’s actually hard to do! I’ll mention one lens that would allow you to do this a little later. But maybe that isn’t the best way to get to an answer, either.
Let’s start instead by looking at some reasonable criteria for choosing your lenses!
First, figure out what you want to take pictures of; in my case that’s fast moving twin girls, usually inside the house, but occasionally outside, in the gym, etc. If your target is landscapes or astronomy, my recommendations below likely won’t be all that helpful to you
Next, while prime lenses tend to give the best picture quality and usually are not as expensive, the ability to change your field of vision while taking shots is very useful in many situations; I tend to use a prime (an Nikon AF 50mm f/1.4) for portraits or really low-light situations, but for most everything else I use zooms.
Inside a house it tends to be somewhat dark without a flash. On the other hand, if you take pictures of people (like little kids, running around and playing) you need to take a large number of shots in order to get good expressions (try getting three-year-old twins to both look at you and smile and you’ll know what I mean). I tend to shoot on low continuos mode (3fps), usually 3-10 pictures in sequence. That often gets me one really good and a couple acceptable shots. But you can’t really do that with flash; the built-in flash doesn’t even allow continuos mode (it only fires on the first shot to prevent overheating), and even with an external flash usually the cycle time isn’t fast enough. And flash is rather distracting to your subjects. And maybe even painful to animals and people with light sensitive eyes.
So think about the ability to take pictures with just the ambient light that you have available to you. This could be daylight or the light from the lights that you have in your house. Once I tried taking pictures without a flash I started to realize just how dark it actually is inside. Which means you want the fastest (i.e., largest aperture) lenses that you can afford, or you risk that many of your shots will be at ISO3200 and with slow shutter speeds. In my experience I tend to get frustrated with anything slower than an f/2.8 (which is another reason why kit lenses rarely are a good idea – they usually are closer to f/3.5-5.6).
Next look at the distance you tend to be from your subjects and what angle of vision you need in order to take the shots you want. Do you need a wide angle (so on the D300 that means something like a 17-35mm) lens? Or something around normal (24-55mm) or a light telephoto (35-70mm)? For the gym it’s more likely a rather strong telephoto lens you are looking at, think 70-200mm.
Then study the tests. There are lots of good sites. Google is your friend. I really enjoy tests – plus the detailed data from Photozone. Understand whether the things they dislike about lenses will affect you. Mild to medium distortions might not matter unless you take architectural pictures (and you can fix distortions in Photoshop, color aberrations on the other hand can really ruin a picture. Vignetting is relatively easy to fix in post-processing as well (both Lightroom and Photoshop offer simple filters for that) , problems with the autofocus can mean that the lens is unusable for day to day shooting.
And finally – remember that you don’t need the best lens out there; you need a lens that works for you. The Nikon AF-S 24-70mm f/2.8G ED is an amazing lens. But it’s huge and heavy. And one of the few lenses that cost about as much as the D300. The AF 35-70mm f/2.8D may be a tiny bit slower in focusing and be lacking the mild wide-angle range, but it is 30% lighter and smaller and costs a quarter of what you pay for the 24-70… Update: unfortunately the 35-70mm f/2.8 lens is indeed gone for good now. It doesn’t appear to be available new anymore.
So which lenses do I currently use? As I mentioned, the Nikon AF 50mm f/1.4 prime is my portrait lens. I also have the Nikon AF 35-70mm f/2.8D as my everyday lens; careful, this one is no longer being made – it’s still available new at some stores, but soon it’ll be used ones, only (see Update above… they appear to be gone). And I splurged for the Nikon AF-S 80-200mm f/2.8D as telephoto zoom. This lens is also no longer being made by Nikon and even seems to have disappeared from their site.
The only lens I have that I wouldn’t recommend is the Sigma 17-35mm f/2.8-4 EX DG. For one thing it isn’t a fixed aperture lens. But more importantly it simply isn’t as sharp as the Nikon lenses and is noticeably slower during autofocus. One of these days I’ll get the Nikon AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8D ED instead. But that one, too, costs about the same as the D300.
Comments(5) I’ve used a Canon Rebel XT for a couple of years and really got into photography through it. When the Canon 40D came out it seemed like a great potential upgrade for me. Reading some of the reviews it seemed like a really good camera. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized that I would soon get frustrated with it as well. It still had some of the same issues that I didn’t like about the Rebel XT that I had:
Basically the 40D is a nice step up from the Rebel XT, but I was sure I would end up wanting more in a year. That’s where the Nikon D300 comes in. It’s more expensive than the 40D but seems to do better on all the things that I didn’t like about the 40D. Or, to phrase it positively, what really sold me on the D300 in comparison can be summed up like this:
After having used the D300 for a couple of weeks all I can say is that I am really happy with my choice.
I’ll write another post about my lenses, later.
