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Fast Agile Beautiful - part 2 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2010

Framing Rate

This is a camera intended for action, with 9fps at full speed and11fps in crop mode. The image may be cropped to a variety of sizes and aspect rations including the popular 5:4 ratio.

There is a 'silent' shutter mode which extends the mirror movement time but in truth does little to the sound - it is not silent.

The burst depth is 27 frames of RAW but the pause before we could start shooting again was quite short. A burst depth of 120 frames is claimed for JPEG shooting. In practice, shooting JPEG Fine we got 34 frames before the camera paused. Buffering the files to an 8GB 300x Lexar cards took 24 seconds. Using small JPEGs allows up to 120 frames to be shot in a burst according to the specifications.

The camera weights 2.4kg equipped with the 24mm to 70mm f2.8 Nikkor. This is quite heavy and it remains a fact that many women photographers would prefer the lighter D300 or D700 and accept the limitations that this imposes. The D700 would still require the full-frame lenses with something of a weight penalty, a D300s would reduce the body weight by some 300g plus a reduction if a smaller, true DX lens was used. The D3S has the same feel as its D3 cousins (the D3X and D3) and sits comfortably and easily in the hand.

For comparative purposes here is the Nikon 'pro' line-up as it stands:

The shots

Squash

This was a real challenge. Squash courts are quite dimly lit and the court gave an incident light reading of 1/125 f2.8 at 3200ISO. This, though, was just the start of our troubles! The court lights were dimming (and losing colour temperature) in line with the voltage frequency (or possibly a harmonic of it). On about 50% of the shots there was a band of discolouration due to the dip in the lights and this tracked the orientation of the camera indicating that it was the movement of the focal plane shutter catching the dips; (see the screen grab of the thumbnails).

Despite this we managed to complete the assignment, shooting typically at 1/1600 f2.8 ISO 6400. A Macbeth Chart, shot and calibrated using ACR Calibrator, delivered an average error of 3.9?E00 which is a good result under the circumstances. We shot using a mixture of the 105mm f2.8 Micro Nikkor and 24-70 f2.8 zoom lens. At 6400 ISO our exposures varied between 1/640 and 1/1600 at f2.8 on an outside court and up to 1/2000 on the (better lit) show court. None of these shutter speeds came close to stopping the ball movement if it had been hit at full tilt.

The Professional Imagemaker

• Fast Agile Beautiful page 1
  
• Fast Agile Beautiful page 2
  
• Fast Agile Beautiful page 3
  
• Fast Agile Beautiful page 4
  
• Fast Agile Beautiful page 5
  
• Fast Agile Beautiful page 6
  

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