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

by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2010

Test Puppies

We used this pair of rascals to check out the auto focus capabilities. It is one of the harder tests and consists of throwing the ball for the dogs to chase and seeing how well the focus-tracking copes. Both 105mm f2.8 Micro Nikkors and 300mm F4 Nikkors were used.

We obtained reasonable colour correction despite the lighting problems. The screen grab, on the left, shows the thumbnails in Bridge and the dark tan colouration due to loss of line voltage on the lighting systems.

The day was bright so we chose to use 400 ISO. The image shown full page in the opening spread was shot at 1/3200 at f4 (on 300mm). The focus plane matches the target area that was selected within the camera and the nose is just a little soft.

Shooting the dogs running with the sun behind them provided a stern challenge. Here we noted that the focus was failing to track Treacle (the black one) but was coping quite well with Fudge (the golden one). We were obviously at the limits of the system's capability. We were successful about 80% of the time on Fudge but hardly at all on Treacle. Reversing the angle and shooting with the sun behind us improved the hit rate in both dogs. Side-on shots were quite straight forward. Typical exposures in this late afternoon, December sunshine were 1/1000 at f5.6 and an ISO of 400.

We have no data to back it up but we got the impression that the D3S was performing better than the D3 we tested some years ago in the same manner.

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