The D3 is AWESOME and INSANE!!! I, tango, on Saturday 29th of December 2007, held a real life working D3 in my pudgy hands!

I was at Suria KLCC that day, looking for some of the missing Star Wars book I needed to complete the list of all Star Wars books (yes, I’m THAT anal). Happily shuffling along when I stumbled upon a Nikon booth at the Centre Court. Circling the booth I saw the holy grail of Nikon cameras. The D3.

Man the thing was HUGE! However my fingers wrapped perfectly around the grip. It’s like the D3 was sculpted to fit my pudgy hands! It was big but beautiful. The advantage of being a Nikon D50 user was that all the controls felt familiar and at the right places. My finger’s muscles immediately felt at home. There were some differences obviously seeing that the D50 was an entry level DSLR and the D3 is a pro camera.

The viewfinder was superbly big and clear. Omigod! Its BIG and BRIGHT!! My eyes were thanking me for letting me peep through the D3 viewfinder. 51 AF points that lights up only when it’s in focus. Nothing to clutter your view. No stencilled AF points whatsoever.

I asked the salesperson if I could hold onto the D3 without it being attached to the tripod. He gave me a nod and I unclipped it from the unidentified Manfrotto. Oh my god its heavy! Oh I need to mention that the D3 was attached to a 400mm f2.8VR. That lens is huge and heavy!! Like foxtrot mentioned to me when I told him about this, “You’re holding a Kancil equivalent in price in your hands” Well, it is AS HEAVY!

Shutter sound was sweet. Not to mentioned the rapid fire of 9 frames per second. Oh it was so so sweet. Sigh..

Since it was a demo unit, I couldn’t access the picture quality except through the high resolution 3 inch LCD which is big and bright with soo much more pixels that my old D50. Reviewing pictures on the LCD was a blast.

I reattached the D3 back to the tripod and caress it lovingly before finally departing the booth all while imagining owning one.

I took one more loving glance at the D3 as I was walking away and then realised all the dark and pissed off looks from people that were behind me when I was playing with the D3.

Oops.. I may have played with it a little too long…

I can only wish to have this experience one day… someday… in the future…

but right now check out Endgadget’s experience in unboxing a Nikon D3. Nice….

As you may already know, Tango and I, armed with our trusty Nikons went to Bukit Jalil to get some photos taken at the Xtreme Nights event held on 7-8 December. Yes, there were cars. Yes, there was booming music. Yes, there were loads of riced up cars. Yes, there were models.

So where are the pics? Well… let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first huh? Bring on part one….

“What?! Where are the chicks??!” I hear you exclaim? Laterlaaaa… doing post processing…

I came across this link to John Harrington’s article while perusing Rob Galbraith’s excellent site.

It’s not your standard review/comparison… but it’s definitely worth a look.

I was over at Bukit Jalil doing some photography (okay, okay… it was more like drooling) for the Xtreme Nights car show. As it was night event, the lighting conditions weren’t ideal. At one point, it was even threatening to rain, but thankfully, it stayed dry while I was there (apart from the puddles of saliva). Anyway, back to the point of this post, I realised a couple of things about the behaviour of my Nikon D70s while taking the pictures. Two things are particularly interesting for me:

1. Exposure Bias (EV) does affect Manual (M) mode

I always thought EV doesn’t affect the manual meter, afterall, you’re in FULL control. You decide what you want the camera to do, and you look at the exposure meter to decide how you want to expose the image. But actually, it does. Setting an exposure of -0.7EV and dialling in the controls for shutter speed (assuming the aperture is not changed), the shutter speed will be higher if you’re bringing the exposure meter to 0EV. This is confirmed in page 86 of the user manual.

2. Slow/Rear Flash Sync doesn’t limit your shutter speed

I always had the problem of the D70s hitting the 1/60s shutter limit set in the menu (in Aperture priority mode) when lighting conditions were difficult and a flash had to be used. This meant that the flash was always going to be the sole light source and that the resulting image wouldn’t be natural in its lighting. Setting the flash to either Slow sync or Rear sync solves this problem. Although now you’re faced with a longer shutter speed and steady hands (or a tripod) would be required.

Although I’ve used this camera for almost 2 years now, I’m still getting to grips with it. And I still love it to bits!

p/s: Yeah.. the pics will be coming soon.. once I get round to processing them. I went with tango, so go here for his shots…

LOOKIT THE NOISE ON THIS!!

I’m at a loss for words.

Image courtesy of http://ishootshows.com/.

More samples here.

We’ve been quiet of late… yeah, we have lives outside of the Internet you know?

With the Nikon D300 and D3 announced, everyone just can’t wait to see the actual production models, or at least some sample images.

I stumbled across this link whilst surfing.. and what I see of the ISO 6400 shots have amazed me. They look like ISO 640 on my D70s!!

Take a look.

Nikon has led Canon in its share of the DSLR market in Japan for the past six months, according to latest sales figures.

Being die hard supporters of Nikon, this is indeed a nice piece of news. We truly believe Nikon is the better product when it comes to DSLR cameras (that’s Digital Single Lens Reflex to you joe public). Canon only had the lead previously due to their huge marketing push and budget. Trying to compare Nikon and Canon company size wise is like comparing a ‘mom n pop’ shop to a supermarket, respectively.

So to all Canon-fanboys… up yours!!

Tango out…

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