After dinking around casually with my Nikon D300 for nearly two weeks, I finally got around to doing an actual photo shoot with it this past weekend. I must say that it really is leaps and bounds better than my D70 and D70s both in terms of operation and image quality. For the $1800 I paid for, it had better be!
Using the camera is a dream. All the controls are quick and easy to access. Auto-focus is fast. The viewfinder is big and bright and has all the shooting info I need to see. The 3″ LCD is absolutely wonderful for chimping. And the camera just feels well-balanced in my hands.
Image-quality-wise, it’s awesome. Color, exposure, sharpness — the all rock. Mostly, though, the amount of shadow detail and dynamic range is simply amazing. In the shot above, the model and city were actually mostly in silhouette. Even though she was lit with three speedlights, the sun was still too much to overpower. Despite that, I was still able to pull out a ton of shadow detail in Lightroom and get pretty darn close to the shot I was originally envisioning in my head. Sure, I could’ve spent more time tweaking light setup to get it right in-camera, but it was freezing out there, and we really needed to move to the indoor shots. Basically, I was lazy and hoped that I could salvage the shot in post. And I managed to do it.
In short, I’m loving this camera. Worth every penny.
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