Associate
Impulse 
eek bought a D300 on Friday, and decided to spend today playing with it in Micheldever woods. Well not really impulse as such as I have been trying to justify one to myself for months to upgrade the D70s, and finally made the decision, and will worry about the consequences when the credit card bill comes through in a months time
Following on from the "what walkabout lens" thread, I saw several people recommended the Tamron 17-50 F2.8 and threw caution to the wind and picked up one of those too. The Jury's still out on my thoughts of that lens, I did a quick test of all the lenses in my possession yesterday by pointing at some text in a magazine and comparing the 100% crops for readability. Wide open it doesn't appear to be very sharp, unless the camera isn't focusing correctly.
If you wish, you can view these results here, but be warned you'll need a pretty high desktop width resolution What did become clear is just how sharp the 70-200 is at F8, and just how much difference there is at different apertures. Maybe my testing was flawed somehow?
Anyway, onto the flora. For those that don't know, Micheldever woods are a small wooded area in Hampshire which sits alongside the M3. They got recommended as a good bluebell spot in one of the magazines, and the car park was full of 'togs carrying tripods off into the woods.
No matter how much I tried, I couldn't get a wide-angle picture that excited me, this was about the best of the bad bunch:
Pretty much just a snap
So I got to crawling about in the mud to get a bit closer. I'm glad to report that the Tamron (which doesn't claim to be a macro lens) focuses pretty close, and I got some pictures which I was much happier with, even if I did forget to "clean" the subject of debris beforehand such as:
Then moved off to the Watercress line to catch a steam train. Except as I was finding somewhere to park, I heard the whistle and rumble of an engine, then waited 45 minutes to see absolutely nothing
Typical! So turned and pointed the 70-200 out the window at the rape field and got this quite pleasing bokeh demo picture, which works quite well as a desktop backdrop if you don't mind a bright background:
All in all I'm over the moon with this camera. Its light and day better than the old D70. The huge LCD on the back is a godsend, and the speed of the CPU allows near-instant zoom into the picture to check sharpness. Live view is kind of interesting, I found it useful when using manual focus (you loose AF anyway when using live view) to see which flower I was focused, making the depth of field very easy to see before taking the shot. The sheer number of buttons on the body also making switching between one set of options to another a breeze, rather than going through the fiddly menu system, which means I now change things far more regularly to match the conditions rather than taking the "this'll do" attitude.
Downsides? Very little. For some reason the 70-200 seems to hunt a lot more than I remember on the old D70, which I'm putting down to user error at the moment. The biggest problem is the size of the images (when using the 14-bit colour depth, lossless compressed option). I used to get thousands out of my 8Gb cards on the old camera - the new one estimates just 303! Its only twice the sensor pixel count, why such a big difference?
If you were dithering between sticking with your current camera or upgrading to the D300, I can thoroughly recommend it.
eek bought a D300 on Friday, and decided to spend today playing with it in Micheldever woods. Well not really impulse as such as I have been trying to justify one to myself for months to upgrade the D70s, and finally made the decision, and will worry about the consequences when the credit card bill comes through in a months time Following on from the "what walkabout lens" thread, I saw several people recommended the Tamron 17-50 F2.8 and threw caution to the wind and picked up one of those too. The Jury's still out on my thoughts of that lens, I did a quick test of all the lenses in my possession yesterday by pointing at some text in a magazine and comparing the 100% crops for readability. Wide open it doesn't appear to be very sharp, unless the camera isn't focusing correctly.
If you wish, you can view these results here, but be warned you'll need a pretty high desktop width resolution
What did become clear is just how sharp the 70-200 is at F8, and just how much difference there is at different apertures. Maybe my testing was flawed somehow?Anyway, onto the flora. For those that don't know, Micheldever woods are a small wooded area in Hampshire which sits alongside the M3. They got recommended as a good bluebell spot in one of the magazines, and the car park was full of 'togs carrying tripods off into the woods.
No matter how much I tried, I couldn't get a wide-angle picture that excited me, this was about the best of the bad bunch:
Pretty much just a snap
So I got to crawling about in the mud to get a bit closer. I'm glad to report that the Tamron (which doesn't claim to be a macro lens) focuses pretty close, and I got some pictures which I was much happier with, even if I did forget to "clean" the subject of debris beforehand such as:
Then moved off to the Watercress line to catch a steam train. Except as I was finding somewhere to park, I heard the whistle and rumble of an engine, then waited 45 minutes to see absolutely nothing
Typical! So turned and pointed the 70-200 out the window at the rape field and got this quite pleasing bokeh demo picture, which works quite well as a desktop backdrop if you don't mind a bright background:
All in all I'm over the moon with this camera. Its light and day better than the old D70. The huge LCD on the back is a godsend, and the speed of the CPU allows near-instant zoom into the picture to check sharpness. Live view is kind of interesting, I found it useful when using manual focus (you loose AF anyway when using live view) to see which flower I was focused, making the depth of field very easy to see before taking the shot. The sheer number of buttons on the body also making switching between one set of options to another a breeze, rather than going through the fiddly menu system, which means I now change things far more regularly to match the conditions rather than taking the "this'll do" attitude.
Downsides? Very little. For some reason the 70-200 seems to hunt a lot more than I remember on the old D70, which I'm putting down to user error at the moment. The biggest problem is the size of the images (when using the 14-bit colour depth, lossless compressed option). I used to get thousands out of my 8Gb cards on the old camera - the new one estimates just 303! Its only twice the sensor pixel count, why such a big difference?
If you were dithering between sticking with your current camera or upgrading to the D300, I can thoroughly recommend it.
