D300 Review

I have had the D300 for a few days now and yesterday afternoon I did a shoot with Amanda who works with me as a production associate in my studio. This is the image that we came up with.

It's funny, every time I get a new piece of software or equipment I'm always dragging my office staff off to shoot them and test it out. Talk about bad working conditions!

I've enjoyed using the D300 so far. The focus seems, for the most part, much faster than the D200 in normal lighting conditions.

I did observe something odd. Yesterday, I did a shoot in my studio and had the lighting pretty low and the D300 seemed to have trouble focusing in single point mode. I switched it to Dynamic Area Autofocus and it locked on every time. I'll post more about this if it proves to be an issue.

The camera has "live view" which makes it work like a consumer camera. You get to see the images on the back of the screen. Sometimes I have to hold my camera up over my head to shoot over the tops of people's heads at weddings. I have gotten to where I'm pretty good at aiming the camera this way, but being able to actually look up and see what the camera is look at is going to be really useful in those crazy dance floor pictures.

We went outside and shot some with Amanda and it was a lot of fun. I L-O-V-E the noise ability of this camera. I shot my daughter running around our living room on ISO 6400 and I could actually use the image if I needed to.

I love having as much ISO as I wanted and not have to worry constantly about noise like I do with the D200.

One thing I noticed in post processing is that the Camera produces noticeably brighter images that the D2x or the D200. In fact, Nikon has released some presets that will make the D300 emulate the D2x and D200.

You can download those presets by clicking here.

I noticed in the fine print this sentance: "*To achieve a level of brightness similar to that of images captured with the D2X/D2XS, set Picture Control Brightness to -1."

And it's true. When we brought the D300 images into Lightroom, we had to treat them a little differently. They were brighter out of the camera.

I think this is a good thing. Most of the information of an image is stored in the brighter parts of the image. So you will get a better image if it's slightly overexposed than if it's underexposed.

We are working the camera into our shoots. First, we'll use the camera ourselves and test it under different conditions, and then we'll use it on some portraits and then it will have some limited use at some weddings and then after we've processed the images we'll start using it exclusively.

I'm really excited about this camera. I think it's going to be an awesome tool for us to use.