Carl Hutzler's Blog

OK, I just dropped $5,000.00 on a camera!. No, not a car, a camera. It takes pictures and not much more. It can’t even take movies for God’s sake :-)

Yes, I could be taking pictures with any number of excellent D-SLR cameras for $600 to $1500 or so. Is my photography worth $5,000? Hmmm.

And we all know its not the camera, the megapixels or any of the other bells and whistles, it’s the photographer, stupid. So why $5000 for a camera?

Because this camera (Nikon D3) is simply revolutionary. It is better (yes I said better) than any other camera on the planet. It actually takes better pictures…really!

It is better than other cameras in one specific area, the sensor. This sensor which is the “film” inside the camera can adapt to any type of light and yield absolutely beautiful results. By type, I mean bright light, contrasty light, color shifted light, anything. And I don’t have to do the adjustments myself…the camera is smart enough to get it right on its own.

So you are thinking, OK. I get it. The white balance is better and the sensor has lower noise at higher ISO settings. And you’d be right. But its so much more.

No it’s not the full frame sensor. It’s not the 10 frames it can shoot in second or the dual CF card slots. It’s not these piddly little things (some of which are very convenient, don’t get me wrong). On this camera the important thing is the sensor’s dynamic range which is much larger and a better quality. And the software intelligently increases the effective dynamic range even more (Nikon Active D Lighting). So we are now talking about a digital camera that can see well in excess of 5 stops of exposure latitude. I have not tested it in a lab, but I bet it can see 8 stops or more. This is amazing.

But the sensor can also yield beautiful low noise images at ISO’s from 100 to 6,400! But the low noise is almost boring compared to the fact that it can also yield accurate color and beautiful highlight and shadow detail as well. Try this on your digital camera. My old one (Nikon D200) yielded poor results above ISO 1200. But it wasn’t just noise, it was nasty harsh colors and poor image quality/noise sharpening. Not that the D200 was a bad camera, but the D3 is amazingly better.

Today I was shooting indoors in a school under crappy florescent lighting. I discovered a neat way of shooting that will forever change how photographers create. Since the ISO almost does not matter, I set the camera to AUTO-ISO which means it adjusts the “film speed” to accommodate my shutter speed and aperture settings.

So I just went into MANUAL exposure mode and set the shutter and aperture as I wished. The camera adjusted the ISO to match the conditions. No longer does the photographer have to choose fast shutter speeds and trade off depth of field. Within reason, it simply doesn’t matter. Pick the shutter you want. Pick the aperture you want. And you get a picture. These variables (aperture and shutter) are no longer related in an inverse relationship. Just pick what you want.

Wow. That is a game changer.

(click on the below images for large file size – warning >2MB each) 

1/125 @ f/4 ISO 800

1/125 @ f/4 ISO 1250

1/125 @ f/4 ISO 3600