Nikon D300
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.
Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?
