Nikon D90 - my first impressions
So, yeah, I'm writing a journal in English again. I know what you'll say. "It's unfuckinbelieveablamazing, we don't see you writing a journal in english often". But it's a special occasion again, and besides, I'm hoping to get more pageviews if people find this text through googling for "Nikon D90" - that's why I put it in the title.
So here I am, after picking up my new camera this evening from the local Nikon dealership. It was supposed to be here three weeks ago, but there were some minor complications (owner died of a heart attack, his nephew took the dealership over and lost it through gambling to a local mafia boss, whose drug addicted daughter, who smells like a bag of damp hamster shavings told me she accepts no cash, only heroin, and... ok, I'm making it up, the camera got stuck at the customs and the owner of the dealership is still alive and probably eating a wiener schnitzel somewhere right now).
I bought it in a kit with 18-105mm VR lens and a remote control, since my primary reasons for switching from D70 to D90 were lesser noise and taking pictures in low-light conditions. And after testing it half an hour ago, I am really satisfied, since I got more than I initially expected.
Now you're probably wondering "Ville, you hairy chimney sweeper in a side-car with chocolate jimmies and a lobster bib, what are you talking about?" Noise. I expected my photos to be free of noise at ISO 800 and at least usable at ISO 1600. But it gets even better. Photos are almost noise-free up to ISO 1000 and those at ISO 3200 still look very usable for less demanding clients (I do press conferences and events on a regular basis and those clients mostly want just pictures, they don't care much about noise as long as it's not too visible). This also means I get to use my 7-kilo (and I have no idea how many lbs is that - I know only metric system) tripod, which I had to carry around during most of the low-light events and which I used more often as a self-defense weapon than for stabilizing the camera.
And here are some examples, all of them shot at ISO 3200, Noise reduction - medium, White balance - tungsten, and most important - no tripod or any other support used:
Those indoor shots were made under extreme light conditions. One single lamp with 60W bulb and semi-opaque cover in the farthest corner of the room and some additional weak light coming through the door from the kitchen. I even added some exposure manually on the camera, and watching this room through my eyes seemed far less bright than in those photos. And as I already mentioned, everything was shot by hand. No tripod, no other support.
This last shot was also taken under extremely low light. The lamp post you see on the right side was the only source of light in surrounding area, every other light was more than 50 meter away.
And then I tried out the movie mode. My first reaction was something like "Holy suppurating papercuts dipped in spicy lemon extract, this is just like a real movie camera". Why? Well, you see, most of the modern digital cameras in price range of less than 100.000$ have sensor size of 10 x 7 mm or even less (especially those cheap camcorders - their sensors are even somewhere at 5x3.5 mm). That makes them pretty unusable when it comes to shallow depth of field. If we want shallow DOF, sure, we need a lens with aperture as wide open as possible (like for example a 50mm f1.8 lens), but it doesn't help much if the sensor on the camera is tiny. That's why full-frame cameras have always better DOF on same lenses than lower price range SLR-s, which, on the other side, have many times better DOF than classic prosumer and amateur digital cameras. And there is an other thing to this movie-like look. Most of amateur cameras operate at 25 frames per second (PAL format in Europe) or 30 frames per second (NTSC format in USA and Japan). On the other side, Panavision cameras, which Holywood uses for filmmaking operate at 24 frames per second, and although it seems like a trivial difference, exactly this is the reason why the real movies have that strange special look when compared to amateur camera recordings.
Now, Nikon D90 has a 24x16mm sensor and 24 frames per second, with 720p resolution (1280x720 pixels - 16:9 format), and it uses quality photo-lenses. I wasn't able to record anything meaningful tonight (except you think recordings of my friend's hamster masturbating his dong off is meaningful), so I won't put anything here now, but in a few days you can expect to see my first experiments. Anyway, those specs I mentioned above make my SLR pretty usable for my little animal-porn movie experiments.
And that's it for first impressions. I can hardly wait to take the camera out tomorrow and shoot some photos. This camera just reeks of adventure and excitement. Or maybe that's actually this 20 days old salami-sandwich I found crawling with life under my computer table.
