Santa Barbara at Night

D300, Tokina 12-24mm lens, handheld.

Long Exposure Landscapes, D300 + 12-24

Shooting more long exposures with the D300 confirmed my initial findings: there is no need for in-camera noise reduction for exposures up to 10 minutes (the longest I tried) at ISO 200. I took twice as many pictures last night, which was a huge benefit with the changing light and quickly moving cloud cover. Something that occasionally led to ruined images on the D70 - when the battery was too low to complete dark-frame NR - is no longer an issue, either.

I was very impressed with the battery power of the D300 vs. the D70. I had expected less battery life from the huge-screened monster. But in fact for long exposure work, I'm getting even better battery life than the D70! On a fully charged D70 battery, I would average about 12-15 5 to 8 minute long exposures before the battery got too low to complete dark-frame NR. Last night with the D300, I managed 12 5 to 8 minute shots and the battery still shows 3 (out of 5) bars!

I recently sold my Tamron 11-18mm superwide lens and bought a Tokina 12-24mm f/4. There were a few things about the Tamron that annoyed me, and I finally had enough and made the switch. Last night I took the Tokina out along with the D300 to test it out.

The Tamron was a great lens, all things considered. It produced most of the landscapes and night work here on Burnblue. But I was constantly bothered by things like the variable aperture, slight softness in the corners, barrel distortion at 11mm, and the focus ring rotating while autofocusing. The Tokina takes care of all those problems. It still has some barrel distortion at the wide end, but not as much. The only thing I really miss about the Tamron is that extra mm on the wide end. It actually does make a noticeable difference!

Overall, I'm quite happy with both new toys. They are both extremely well built, beautifully functional tools.

Sunset, Blue Ridge Mountains

My Father

Love you, Dad.

Hendry's Beach, Evening

D300, Tamron 11-18mm, 1.75 stop medium GND filter

D300 Sunset, Hendry's Beach

Taken with the D300 and a Nikkor 85mm f/1.8D.

Clouds, Blue Ridge Mountains

D300 Shadow Detail test

So, we've all been in the situation where the subject you want to shoot is positioned directly between you and the sun. It's a challenge to get a good image in such a scenario, especially if you don't have (or don't want to use) fill flash.

Here's what your typical camera metering might produce in a strongly backlit scene:

The subject, in this case a tall leafy plant, is extremely underexposed. The image is more or less worthless. Without fill flash, the best in-camera solution would be to meter without the sun/sky in the shot, use AE lock and re-take the shot. However, this will tend to over-expose the sky and may flare badly, as it did here:

So, in-camera fixes aren't cutting it. But I know from my D70 days that trying to restore detail in an extremely underexposed shot like the first one tends to result in huge amounts of ugly noise and very poor color rendition. Detail in such deep shadow areas is just not there to recover.

Enter the D300. I was impressed with the D300's dynamic range before, but after today I'm just amazed...

This is the same shot as the first one, but with Lightroom/ACR's "Fill light" slider all the way to the right ('99')! The detail and colors are amazing, given the severity of the underexposure. There is noise, of course, but it's very even and doesn't 'block up' in the shadow transitions like the D70 (and other previous generation Nikons) did. Overall I'd be comfortable making an 8x10 print of the result.

Here are two 100% crops of an identical area of the photo, before and after applying the Fill light command:

I'm just blown away by the level of detail preserved in what appeared to be solid black shadow. I wouldn't hesitate to use this technique in a professional shoot, if there was no way to use fill flash. More importantly, my landscape images will benefit from the increased dynamic range, as I can 'dodge' detail back in to areas that fell in deep shadow.

For those interested, both images were shot with a Tokina 12-24mm lens at f/8, ISO 200. They were taken in 14-bit compressed (lossy) RAW format and converted using Lightroom and saved for web in Photoshop CS3.

Santa Barbara Surf

Surf's been humongous the last couple days... good for surfers, and photographers too!

D300 Portraits

Tested the D300 out yesterday at the Santa Barbara Folk and Tribal Arts Festival at the Museum of Natural History. These portraits are of Macedonian folk dancers who performed several traditional dances. My fiancee Jade performed as well, as part of a belly dance ensemble.

I was very happy with the D300's handling, especially the autofocus. Until now, shooting in fast-moving performance situations with the 85mm Nikkor at f/2.8 or wider tended to produce a lot of out-of-focus shots, but no more... Almost every single shot was in acceptable focus. I used the 51-point dynamic AF mode with 3D tracking, and it's superb. It even magically recognizes faces - if there's two eyes in the shot, the D300 is far less likely to lock on to another area of high contrast than previous cameras I've used.

The only feature that didn't impress me was the auto white balance. I was shooting under really odd lighting conditions - bright daylight on one hand, and a yellow tent with artificial lighting on the other, with dancers moving back and forth between the two. These conditions would have been a test for any camera, but I expected more from the D300. It consistently rendered the tent shots too yellow - I find this happens indoors under tungsten lighting as well. Like all Nikons I've used, it errs on the warm side, while I tend to prefer a cooler balance. On the plus side, it was extremely consistent - one fix in post could be applied to every other shot under the same lighting. So that's a plus.

My biggest gripe is not the D300's fault - I run out of memory card space at an astonishing rate! Even with RAW set to 12 bit compressed, this thing eats storage space. I went through a 2 gig card in a little over an hour. Looks like it's time to buy more CF cards again...