I’ve made a decent effort – perhaps to the point of being annoying – to be clear that I consider myself a non-photographer. Initially I used the term “amateur photographer”, but I realized that this wasn’t distinct enough – some “amateur photographers” go on international trips just to shoot pictures and hone their craft. That’s not the image I was trying to conjure up, so I switched to the term non-photographer.

I wrote a brief post some time ago titled “Amateur vs. Enthusiast vs. Pro” (before adopting non-photographer) to better state what I meant by this, but I always intended to revisit the topic and be a little clearer about the differences. I feel especially compelled to do that now, as despite lugging around the professional D3 and even some pro-oriented glass, I’m still definitively a non-photographer. What do I mean when I say this? Perhaps this table will help:

Each row in the table (except perhaps the last) requires a little elaboration, which is below…

A while ago, before Herman finally settled on a D7000, I wrote a post on the D7000 vs. D90 since I used the latter for quite some time before upgrading to the former, providing a few reasons why I thought the choice for many would come down to those two (though the D5100 wasn’t available then).  I also mentioned, in talking about lens selection, that full frame just doesn’t make sense for most people, and thus not to buy lenses with the assumption of going to full frame.

Of course, all that was before buying that big batch of equipment, which temporarily put a full-frame D3 in my possession – which I’m still using for the moment. This has actually turned out to be pretty handy, because I’ve had to send my D7000 back to Nikon again due to oil spots appearing on the sensor; this is an issue that some D7000 users have encountered, and while Nikon cleaned it up the first time I sent it back, the problem has recurred. Since it can take Nikon a while to service anything (customer service is definitely not their strong suit), it’s pretty fortunate to have two bodies!

So, what’s the experience been like with the D3? In short, despite that it’s closing in on being 4 years old (which is about 80 in camera-years), it’s still a fantastic camera. It’s not all good, but here’s what I noticed most:

• What I said before about it being too big, too heavy, and too expensive is still all true. Even used, a D3 in good condition with a low shutter count is more than $3,000, and it’s monstrously large. The price tag is even higher for either of its updated siblings, the D3s and D3x. The weight is still something I can manage; it’s much lighter than either of my two kids!
• Performance wise, its 12MP full-frame sensor (same as in the D700) is still great; even after all this time, modern crop sensors like in my D7000 still can’t match it at ISO 3200 or 6400.  The D3 sensor also seems to preserve highlights better. It’s just amazing that this sensor was introduced so long ago and still beats any crop sensor. If this was any other type of silicon (e.g. a CPU or GPU), it wouldn’t even be close.
• A pro lugging a bag won’t care about this, but the fact that there’s no built-in flash is somewhat inconvenient; and if you want to do off-camera flash, you need at least an SB-800 to act as a commander. I’d definitely favor the D700 even if you just want the improved sensor.
• I still like the full-frame look; I don’t know whether it’s the shallow depth of field or just the color rendition, but it seems to have the edge over the sensors in either the D90 or D7000, even when low light is not an issue.
• While my most used lens – the 24-70/2.8 – is useful for me on both full-frame and crop sensors, I like it better on the full-frame D3 than on the crop sensor D7000.
• Autofocus; see below.

Autofocus Performance

What’s actually better about the D3 than anything else I’ve ever used? Quite simply, the speed of its auto-focus (while still maintaining accuracy, I suppose):

If you click to zoom in, you’ll see that while it’s not perfectly pixel-sharp – this is an object clearly in motion, after all – the focus is really where it should be (you can see based on the non-moving grass).  Usually I have to take 10 shots like the above hoping for one sharp one, or try and pre-focus and hope for the best, but the D3 really nailed things on almost every shot.

Even more remarkable, it’s not that it just locks on for the first shot, it’s able to keep things in focus even in continuous burst mode:

This is the same jump as the first picture; all I did was just hold the shutter down. I’m sure I’ll be missing this kind of speed once I switch back to the D7000 on a more permanent basis, but at least it suggests there’s still things to be improved on the consumer bodies.

Now I can understand why dedicated sports shooters might pony up the big bucks for a D3-class body; it’s not enough for me that the D3 makes sense as a primary camera, but at least I know that at least some D3 owners are definitely getting what they paid for.

Firmware Updates

Ironically, I’ve used these bigger cameras when the cameras I’ve actually owned for the long term have been in for repair. I got the D700 when sending my D90 back into Nikon (it was completely dead till they replaced a circuit board), and now I’m using the D3 exclusively while the D7000 gets cleaned again.

And just yesterday, I ran into “dead battery syndrome” with D3, in which with a perfectly good battery the camera just displays a battery warning indication and refuses to function.  This post was almost a gripe about how Nikon DSLRs make great images, but seem to be lacking in reliability or quality control.

Fortunately, this D3 battery problem was corrected with new user-installable firmware (I had 1.00, 2.00 fixes the problem, and 2.02 is the latest for the D3). But I’m writing this because I ran into some real quirks installing the firmware.  The D3 has two firmware files, an ‘A’ file and a ‘B’ file. The ‘A’ file installed per Nikon’s instructions; copy it to the root of a CompactFlash card, put the card in the camera, then select firmware update in the menu – simple!

The ‘B’ file didn’t work this way for me, though. The camera saw the file, gave the option of doing an update, said it was upgrading… and then dropped back to menus. No error message, no information, and no change to the ‘B’ firmware! I tried reformatting the card in the camera, reformatting it in the computer, changing batteries, changing cards – nothing worked.

Finally, I decided to try formatting the memory card in-camera and then transferring the file over USB (with the D3 connected to my PC via USB), in case something about how the file was being written by Windows 7 using my card reader was incompatible. Bingo! This actually worked, and got the ‘B’ firmware installed.

This is all pretty boring, but since I found nothing on this in my own Google searches, I’m hopeful that someone else encountering this issue might be fortunate enough to stumble upon this thanks to the magic of Internet search!

I was never a big fan of flash photography. When I got my first DSLR, the D60, I got the most basic available flash with it (the $100 SB-400) so that at least I could try and bounce light off the ceiling, and avoid the reflections and highlights that are inevitable when you flash something head on. I greatly preferred not to use flash at all, but the high ISO performance of the D60, and relatively low speed of the 18-200 lens I used exclusively on the D60 didn’t really make this possible. Indoors, flash was required, though fortunately the SB-400 was a cheap and competent performer. With the D60, 34% of the pictures I took used flash.

The D90’s improved high ISO looked like it would allow me to avoid flash even more, especially because it coincided with getting my first prime lenses, the 50/1.4 and 85/1.8, which do much better in low light situations. But this was mitigated by a couple of things. First, besides being relatively dark inside, the quality of light in our home was poor – ISO aside, things looked better and colors looked more natural with flash. Second, Greg convinced me I should get the better SB-600, which I did; the ability to bounce at any angle and remotely trigger the flash from an off camera position caused significant improvements. Thanks Greg! With the D90, 40% of the pictures I took used flash.

Moving to the D7000 offered even better high ISO performance, but was so clear at ISO 100 that staying low using flash was also appealing. Most of my time with the D7000 has seen in paired with the SB-600, though I did recently go to the marginally better SB-800 (which also provided two flashes in total), after picking it up in that lot sale I mentioned earlier. So far, I’m a good bit lower at 33.5% flash with the D7000, though this is artificially low because I spent winter (usually a high-flash situation) in Asia, often outdoors, with flash not being necessary. So interesting that my flash use seems more or less consistent!

One thing that didn’t change, though, is where I used flash – almost all indoor photos, if light was poor, used flash, and virtually all outdoor photos did not. Fill flash even outdoors can be recommended, but I rarely used this for three reasons – it’s usually head-on (no walls to bounce off outdoors!) so it has that direct flash look I don’t like, it adds too much bulk if I’m not carrying a camera bag (which I usually don’t), and perhaps because of different light temperatures, I just never liked the actual color that was created.

This past weekend was the first real exception to this rule; Wen and I dragged some flash gear to Edwards Gardens to try things out, and the results were interesting! We brought the umbrella I got recently (and had only used it to shoot the pictures of the Lensbaby I mentioned in this post), but with the top removed for use in shoot-through mode, paired with an SB-800. It’s a matter of taste, but I liked the result:

An unexpected side effect of this was that the output duration of a flash is so fast (typically 1/700th – 1/1000th of a second) that it freezes those ever-moving kids, often much more than is possible with available light shooting (natural light allowed for 1/60th, f/4.5, ISO 200). In conjunction with the awesome sharpness of the 70-200/2.8 used to take the above, the amount of detail captured was pretty stunning (a 100% crop of the eye area):

Greg commented that it looked like the umbrella was too close, and he might be right, though I actually don’t mind the effect and indeed think I prefer it. I actually thought it should be close, both from the few explanations I’ve seen of how people light a scene, and from this very helpful article for beginners by David “Strobist” Hobby, “Lighting 101: Umbrellas” – well worth reading – in which he states a preference for shoot-through umbrellas “because you can bring it right up next to someone’s face for both power and softness“. Of course, just do what you think looks good!

We tried a few other things, like using a second SB-600 from behind to create some hair highlights; this picture wasn’t focused well, but does demonstrate the effect:

A more subdued version of this with Linxi:

It was actually impossible to really adjust this because you had to get lucky to get the kids in the frame at all and to have both flashes fire (with no walls for reflections, the rear flash often won’t fire). Still interesting, though!

You might look at this and say hey, this (and several recent posts) don’t look at all like supposedly non-photographer stuff; walking around a public park with multiple remote-triggered flashes and a shoot-through umbrella seems to cross some sort of “seriousness” line. I’ll comment on this separately at some point, but will just mention a couple of things:

1. I agree! This was just a fun experiment, and has zero chance of becoming part of my regular kid-shooting routing. It doesn’t work at all if there aren’t two of you taking pictures, and believe me, Valerie is not going to ever help me with something like this!
2. I still prefer natural light, since as a non-photographer I want to capture a memory as opposed to creating a photo that isn’t what things actually looked like. That said, we go out when it’s convenient for the kids, not when the light is good, so having this as an option is a good idea.
3. If you already have a flash, a shoot through umbrella is actually just about $25-30, and is actually more portable than a regular umbrella. We did have a bracket for the flash, but didn’t bother with a stand and often just let the umbrella sit on the grass. This is a pretty cheap way to get a lot more out of your existing flash!

Olivia’s reaction to the whole umbrella thing was funny, of course, she was convinced we were just bringing it along because it was going to rain – even though there was barely a cloud in the sky! Of course, then she proceeded to show who’s the boss, by making it rain grass on the umbrella!

Since I seem to have written way too many posts that are related to photography, I created an index page to organize this a little, since I don’t even know what I said anymore. Hopefully this will keep me from saying the same thing many times! It’s also a menu option on the header.