A Month with the D700

For the last few months I have felt as if my camera was holding me back in terms of creative options. Now, I did not have a wimpy little point and shoot. I had a d200. But, for example, I was limited in low light situations to either not shooting or very small depth of fields in order to get high enough shutter speeds to take a nice image. If I upped the ISO on the d200 anything about 400 ended up giving me so much noise that I could not use the image.

So I sold the d200, a battery pack, and a lens I haven't used since getting the 70-200mm 2.8.

And bought a d700.

Look here over the next few weeks to get a better idea of what a d700 can do. What you won't find here is various specification and other technical jargon (like EXPEED Processors, or Anti-dust features). What you will find is a log of my every day shooting and learning about the camera and how it works.

10-01-2008

Check out this one. Tonight was very, very cloudy in Minneapolis. Overcast. Gray. I took the d700 to the park to run my daughter around. I used some flash in this picture. There is no way the d200 could ever do this. No noise. Tack sharp. ISO 800.

She is normally this happy.

ISO 800 example

10/4/2008

Battery is at 57% after shooting nearly 400 pictures. On the d200 I would be on the second battery already.

Make sure you change your vivid color management back to standard when taking pictures of people. I ended up with a bunch of sunburned folks because the vivid is so vivid. Great for intense colors, but not so much for skin tones. The other thing I've notices is that if you + up the vivid too much you start losing details in the vivid area. So you got to be a little careful with it.

10-13 2008

I put the 70-200mm with the 1.7 teleconverter on today and went to the zoo. That combination is very unforgiving in terms of sharpness, etc...In fact, I forgot to take off the filter like I did with the d200 and this combination and I ended with all kinds of not-quite-sharp images - especially when shooting through the thick zoo glass.

I got a couple of ok shots, but I'll be remembering to take off that filter when I use the tc from now on.

10-20 2008

I tried out the my only DX lens the 12-24 f/4 in FX mode today. Anything above 18mm fills the FX frame. Is this really 18mm now? At 12 you get close to a whole circle. So it is actually now too bad using the DX lens in FX mode. It is especially cheaper than buying the 14-24 if I'm only missing 4mm to fill the frame. I bet if I take the filter off I get another mm or 2.

10-21 2008

Check out this gallery of the DX on the FX. Each of these shots was taken at the Minnesota Zoo with my kids as models. Notice how at 12mm it is completely unusable - you might as well have put the d700 into DX mode or just crop out the middle to make a 5 megapixel picture. But by the time you get to 16 and 17mm the lens completely fills the frame.

The lens had no filter and no hood on it at the time.

[Show as slideshow]

Here are a couple more pics from today. These are all shot at ISO 800. The first is with the 12-24. The next one is with the 105mm VR Macro lens. I wandered around in the woods for quite awhile and came away with a couple of nice mushrooms.

The mushrooms were pretty fun to make. The d700 has a commander mode (much like the d200 or the d2x or the d70 for that matter) and I put the sb-r200's around the mushrooms. One to the right and one to light up underneath. I also used a monopod because I can hold the camera steady vertically or horizontally, but the Z axis (in and out) always puts me out of focus.

DX on FX at 17mm or so.

D700 Macro shot

10/30/2008

Today is nasty and rainy here in Minneapolis, so I worked on high ISO settings

Compared to the d200, it is something like this - although at 200 on the d200 there was a smidgen less noise than at 800 on the d700. But at ISO 400 it is very similar to ISO 1600 on the D700

ISO 800 = ISO 200

ISO 1600 = ISO 400

ISO 3200 = ISO 800

ISO 6400 = ISO 1600