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|| SportsShooter.com: News Item: Posted 2007-12-17
Photographer's Toy Box: Nikon D300- The Ultimate Stocking Stuffer
By Walter Calahan
Photo by Walter Calahan
This portrait was shot with a Nikon D300 at 800 ISO.
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'Tis the season to buy yourself what your love ones won't this holiday.
A Nikon D300!
Yes, yes, we're all sports shooters, so why am I not suggesting the Nikon D3?
'Cause unless you have very large stocking, say size 18, the D3 won't fit. HA!
I like a smaller camera, not a brick hanging from my shoulder. If I were a regular D2HS user, the D3 is the ideal replacement. The D3 IS a great camera.
As a generalist photographer, whose clientele wants top quality, large files, and can give a rat's bottom whether my camera is 'full frame', the quality and image size of the D300 fits my needs better, with a lot less girth. Slim down America!
The D300 reminds me more of the traditional professional camera before the motor drive was built-in. Think Canon F-1, or Nikon F, F2, or F3.
The D300 is solid in the hand. It has a greater body depth than the D200. Which means all my 'L' plates for the D200 from Really Right Stuff won't fit because they are about 3/16" too narrow. Dang it! More money to spend.
So what's to love about this camera. The ergonomics of the camera's layout follows Nikon's tradition of uniformity, even though some buttons have moved, or been improved.
The files are huge when shooting RAW or Jpeg fine. No one should have a problem using these images as magazine covers or double truck layouts (who publishes double trucks anymore?). I've heard that Nikon has vastly improved image noise, but I wouldn't know because I rarely shoot above 200 ISO.
That said, I did have a B&W assignment using the D300 at 800 ISO. I shot RAW, and the files were clean as a whistle.
Next, the LCD screen is brilliant. What's not to love about acreage? It's big, it's clean, and it is the same screen you'll get on the D3. An art director with whom I recently work never asked to see the images on a computer monitor, or to go tethered. The LCD gave him all the information he needed to see the shoot was getting done.
The viewfinder sees 100% of the image area, and it is magnified, so the DX format doesn't make you feel like you're looking into a tunnel.
Without the added battery pack, the camera shoots a very quick 6 frames per second. I can't remember when I've ever shot 6 frames a second. The buffer is large, so takes a long time to slow down, and the image processor is quick. The camera has the same processor as the D3.
You're going to go bonkers over 51-point 3D focusing. AMAZING. The same focusing system as the D3.
The 'Everready Bunny' has nothing on the D300's battery life. The first charge kept going and going and going and going and going. Finally after about 1800 RAW files shot, with the battery level indicator saying it still had plenty of juice, I recharged it simply for laughs.
Finally, auto white balance has been improved. The first job I shot with the D300 was in a building with large windows letting in lots of daylight, with all the rooms lit with fluorescent lighting. The camera blended the white balance correction very well. I still had to do a little global tweaking of all the files in Adobe RAW to clean up the color just a touch. Global corrections are now so easy and fast in CS3, that this added step did not slow down my workflow.
Having shot 1120 images on assignment on the very first day owning this camera, I'd say it's a winner, until Nikon releases the D400. You hear me Nikon? when is that happening? Double Grin.
(Walter Calahan is a freelance photographer based in Maryland. He also teaches photography at McDaniel College.)
Related Links:
Walter's member page
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