Craig Brelsford
10-25-2010, 10:24 PM
Dear Friends at BPN: In the quotation below, taken from an e-mail to a photographer friend who knows less than I do, I shared what I know about the top Nikon cameras. I want to share those thoughts with you all now. Please critique my critique. Do I have a good grasp of the issues? Is there some insight that I'm missing or don't fully grasp? What can you add to what I was telling my friend? Your help may be decisive as I agonize over whether to get a D3S now or wait until the D4 comes out, rumored for next year. THANKS. "As you may know, I use the D300. It's a cropped-sensor camera, as is I think the D700. For flying birds and for birds in low light, the D300 just isn't the best camera. My only decision now is whether to get a D3S now or wait until next year and get the D4. The D4 hasn't come out yet but should be out next year. The D3s is the best high-ISO camera in the world, and high ISO is what you need to capture flying birds. At Rudong this month, I wasted an hour trying to photograph flying reed parrotbills with my D300. Because the birds were flying among reeds, the light was a little low, and that meant I had to jack up the ISO to 800 and beyond, and my D300 often gives noisy results at high ISOs. At ISO 800, the chance for noise is very high with my D300, but a D3S can handle ISO 1600 and above with few problems. For birds in low light (especially birds in low light that are moving), the D3S or D3X is also the choice over the D300, I've found. In good light, the D300 performs well, and in some cases is preferred over the D3S because of the cropped sensor. But I figure that I can make up for the uncropped sensor of the D3S or D3X or (I'm assuming) next year's D4 simply by improving my fieldcraft skills. That is to say, a good photographer can make the disadvantage of the D3 series less of a disadvantage simply by getting closer to the bird. I'm pretty good at getting close to many species of birds. (Some birds, such as the eyebrowed thrush, are beyond my fieldcraft abilities; they're so very very shy.) I have a strong understanding of my D300 and use it well; I'm proud, for example, of my results with the D300 shooting birds sitting still in low light. (My fairy pitta [www.shwbs.org/swb/read.php?tid=4886] in June and my rock thrushes [www.shwbs.org/swb/read.php?tid=5278] this month in Rudong are good examples.) I've become very good at shooting at low shutter speeds and keeping the camera from shaking. But despite my many triumphs with the D300, I'm looking forward to retiring it in favor of the D3 or D4 series. I've seen enough bird photographers with the D3 series and am confident that it's overall a step up, though I must add that body is not everything and that the skills of the photographer can make up for many of the deficiencies of the D300. By the way, the question of D3S or D3X was answered by Ken Rockwell, who said that the D3X is the best camera Nikon's ever made but is a bad deal, because it's much more expensive than the D3S but isn't much better of a camera."