D300 and High ISO

[retief]

I posted this at "another place" the other day and got some interesting comments. Now, to all you Canon shooters, I know you can do this in the blink of eye, and have been for years, but give us Nikon folks a break, it's new to us ;);):biggrin:, but your comments are most welcome as well :cheer:

We had a short spell, a couple of hours, of decent weather on Friday morning so I headed to the Trumpeter Swan Night Roost for the dawn flyout near my house. With the D200, I would have stood around not shooting, or getting total garbage, for quite some time. Here is one of the shortly after dawn shots, sunrise was at 7:55AM, and at this spot we don't see the sun over the hills for about 10 more minutes.

RAW processing done in Capture NX V1.3. In-camera High ISO NR is set to Low, in NX I changed from Faster to Higher Quality and Edge Noise Reduction as well as setting Color Moire to Medium.

This image is right out of NX, with the changes noted above, sharepened for NR.

http://www.deweydrive.com/g2/gallery2/d/13130-2/_3013826_FromNX.jpg

The following image has had a touch of Nik Dfine done for the background only in CS3 after the same processing in NX as the prior image.

http://www.deweydrive.com/g2/gallery2/d/13125-2/_3013826.jpg

Now, folks may say "No deep shadows", etc, but remember the feet and bill are about as dark as you can get, and there is plent of dark crud in the trees in the background as well. Right subject matter, decent exposure, helps a lot as well.

I sure could not have done this with prior cameras, that is for sure.

Oh, before I forget, ISO 5000, Shutter Priority, 1/500s. If you look at the EXIF, 950mm is NOT correct, it is actually 680mm, 400mm f2.8 plus Nikon TC-17E.

[Keith]

That is very impressive, you got to be a happy camper. So happy for you Bill, I know you had allot of anxiety this past year as to what to do, looks like you made the best choice for you and obviously from the pics, your doing great with your new addition. Still allot of things about Nikon I miss, but its all about finding what works for you and your shooting style. Great to see Nikon hit one out of the park, possibly 2. Only good for all of us when the envelope gets pushed :brows:

[retief]

Thanks, Keith, but I'm not sure "anxiety" is quite strong enough :arghh::arghh: I'm just glad that you and the other folks here put up with my incessant questions, it really helped a lot.

It is awfully nice to now have the opportunities that you folks have had for a while, and I am absolutely certain that no only do I not care which brand is "best", I don't beleive for an instant that there is any way that anyone could justify a "winner" without being simply biased. We all win.

The one thing that I truly believe is that to get clean shots at these high ISO's you do need a need a combination of subject, exposure and post process. The out-of-the-camera JPG looks pretty good, but you can certainly see improvement with a judicious use of Post Processing. Sort of like Darkroom work in those old-moldy film days :biggrin:

As happy as I am with the D300, and as great as the D3 seems to be, I still can't see any single compelling reason that someone invested in Canon should make a switch, unless they simply want to of course ;)

That is very impressive, you got to be a happy camper. So happy for you Bill, I know you had allot of anxiety this past year as to what to do, looks like you made the best choice for you and obviously from the pics, your doing great with your new addition. Still allot of things about Nikon I miss, but its all about finding what works for you and your shooting style. Great to see Nikon hit one out of the park, possibly 2. Only good for all of us when the envelope gets pushed :brows:

[Mao]

As happy as I am with the D300, and as great as the D3 seems to be, I still can't see any single compelling reason that someone invested in Canon should make a switch, unless they simply want to of course ;)

The D3 impresses me a lot. While I'm not switching over, I'd like to wait until the D3X comes out and sure would be great complimenting it with either the 400 mm. F2.8 or the 500 mm. F4.

Meanwhile the D300 is no slouch either. Seen excellent results coming out of it.