News from Billy Monday
Sally Freedman, 2008The Nikon D300
While I normally prefer to work with rangefinders, they do have their limitations. So for the last two years I’ve been keeping a Nikon D200 close at hand, in case I wanted to use long lenses, or to shoot moving subjects, or for any of the other uses at which SLRs excel.
The D200 is an excellent camera. It’s very solid body and (to me) nearly perfect ergonomics make it a comfort and a pleasure to use. It fits right in my hands and does nothing unexpected.
Several photographers had new D300s at my workshop in November, 2007. From that day since, I’ve had several opportunities to use D300s and have very impressed by the image quality on each occasion. It’s got the same solid build as it’s predecessor, and the ergonomics incrementally improved over the ‘200. 14 bit raw files made at ISO 3200 are really quite usable, and noise at ISO 400 and below is virtually non-existent. But the feature that got my wallet out of my back pocket was “Live View”, something that I initially thought was a marketing gimmick.
Live View, in so called “Tripod Mode”, make the camera a pleasure to use when mounted on a tripod. The giant screen clearly shows your subject and the days of squinting through the tiny viewfinder are over. You can zoom on your subject which helps in facilitating a very precise focus. It looks like I’ll need to start carrying a dark cloth, because I intend to be much more disciplined about using a tripod both on location and in the studio.
I’ve had a couple of nice sessions as I begin to get accustomed to this new body. Sally Freedman came in from Chicago and we worked both in the studio and in the woods and waterfalls around Frederick County. I’ll be posting more images we made together soon.
Back to the archives