I know that a vast majority of you won't care about anything I'm about to say. Bear with me, I don't get to share this stuff with a lot of people so it has to have some type of outlet.
So, last night's shooting alongside Adrian and Quach allowed me to notice a few more handling characteristics of the camera. First off, the camera is an all magnesium body, much like my old D200, but this body feels more solid. The body along with the battery pack feel like one piece of metal unlike my D200 which felt very much like two separate pieces of electronics screwed together at the bottom.
Here is the D300 magnesium body shell. Photo from dpreview.com.
The MB-D10 vertical grip battery pack. Photo from dpreview.com. This pack allows for three battery options: original battery taken by the camera (shown on the left), a battery used in either the D2X or D3 (shown on the right) or a pack with eight AA batteries.
The MB-D10 on the D300 body. This battery pack is an exceptional piece of equipment. It is miles ahead of the D200 battery pack. It is made of magnesium like the camera body, whereas the D200 battery pack is made of a very obvious and frumpy plastic. The MB-D10 is specifically shaped to fit one's hand perfectly. I really does feel like butter. I was extremely impressed with the vertical grip upon first handling and still am right now.The battery pack also opens the D300 to an 8 frams per second burst.
With makes shooting sports or performances a little easier because I have that peace of mind that I can shoot a reliable burst without missing too much in between. This is not an excuse to be trigger happy, however.
New with the D300: Picture Control Functions
Picture Control is Nikon's new color formatting interface. Picture Control allows the user to customize their shooting parameters according to how the user would like to shoot the scene as far as color and contrast is concerned. It comes in five functions: Neutral, Standard, Vivid, Monochrome and Custom. The amazing part is that each can be fine tuned by the user to give more or less saturation or contrast according to how the user wants to set them.
Here is the Picture Control menu screen. Easy.
I am able to pick a picture setting and adjust further from there. For instance, here I picked Standard, but now I can adjust individual settings to better suit my needs. Push the arrow left or right on "Quick adjust" and I am able to set the camera to be more saturated or sharpen with three seconds of adjustment time.
Ability to customize gets crazy from here. In this screen, I am able to use a curve graph and set adjustments much like I would during post-editing in Photoshop. Damn!What does that all mean while shooting? Well, here are a few examples...
I set up this bottle of Vault energy drink in the office and shot various pictures with the D300 set on the table and 50mm set at f/2.8. From here, I took a series of shots, each one adjusting the picture control to -3, 0 and +3 on Neutral, Standard and Vivid. Here, you are able to see just how much contrast and saturation the camera is able to do by itself:
I cropped the Neutral -3 imaged with the Vivid +3 image to show how much the green changed:
This is a crop of the same area of the bottle in each picture. Neutral -3 is on top while Vivid +3 is on bottom. Pretty big difference considering this is the same part of the bottle and the camera was not changed in any other way other than Picture Controls.What Does This All Mean?
Since the D300 has a "My Menu" function in the menu, I can put whatever I want into one screen for me to adjust. So, for instance, if I am shooting a portrait or a scene with a lot of faces, I can very quickly adjust the camera from shotting really vivid colors to shooting more natural tones so as not to make everyone's face look orange (which I've done many times beings stuck in one picture mode). Now I can comfortably switch saturation and contrast settings without missing the action or effing up the shot, which means less editing on the back end which means faster work flow. I love that thought.
Live View
Live view allows me to view what the sensor sees from the back LCD, much like a point-and-shoot camera. This is new to modern DSLRs. The D300 has two modes of Live View - Hand held mode and tripod mode. For me, tripod mode is most interesting because I can auto focus while in Live View mode, something that Canons cannot do (usually to auto focus, the camera has to close the mirror, auto focus, then bring the mirror back up and open the shutter door to go back into Live View. With Nikon's tripod mode, there's none of that time-wasting stupidness).
Will I use this? Probably not on a regular basis. The cool thing about tripod mode Live View is that I can zoom in on the image and fine tune the focus manually. So, if I'm shooting macro and really need a spot-on focus to achieve what I want, I can do that by zooming to 100% and adjust accordingly instead of shooting a frame and looking at the image review.
Whew, that was a lot. More to come.
P.S. I sat in the office and wrote all this up because I am so bored. There is really no one here to hang out with and I finished all my work hours ago. Everyone is working their internships already and I still have about a week of waiting around. This week sucks.
4 comments:
I just read all of that because I am equally bored. Go me!
And the difference of the greens is just shocking.
I miss the office, iChat, music and people to talk to.
Instead I get to sit alone in a corner and work for eight hours.
I hate that we all have to do this whole "real world" thing.
BALLIN!! When did you get that bad boy?
I'm not really sure why I used the term "bad boy". awkward.
very cool. what lens did you use for 50 mm at f/2.8? did you also get a prime 50?
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