Nikon D300

A few months ago Nikon released updates to their prosumer and professional lines with the D300 and D3.

The D3 is obviously better but for me the fact that it’s a full frame camera is a disadvantage. Unlike most full frame cameras I would be able to use my DX lenses with it but at a greatly reduced resolution. Buying a very expensive 12 megapixel camera and then fitting lenses that only let you work at 5 megapixels does seem to be defeating the purpose.

So the D300, which has the same resolution but with a DX sensor, is the more interesting one for me.

DPReviews has just done a review of it.

Some of the advantages over my d80 are: improved resolution, dust reduction, faster continuous shoot mode, better noise reduction and weather seals.

A summary of the review is, I want one.

I’m due to get some money at some point (hopefully this year) and I’m in two minds about how to use it. Get a D300 or buy some better quality lenses.

The conventional wisdom is: If you buy mediocre lenses and a great camera in five years you’ll have mediocre lenses and an obsolete camera. Whereas if you buy great lenses and a mediocre camera, in five years you’ll have great lenses and an obsolete camera.

That points to updating my lenses but it’s harder to know what constitutes a good lens. With cameras it’s pretty simple

D3 > D300 > D80 > D40

The numbering doesn’t really make sense but it’s easy enough to remember. With lenses though there’s a lot more choice which makes things trickier.

Decisions, decisions.

Photo Icons

Photo Icons (ISBN: 978-3822840962) by Hans-Michael Koetzle is a collection of pictures from the last couple of centuries that, for one reason or another, has become an icon. Each picture is accompanied by a description of the photographer and the process behind the picture.

The books starts off with the first photographs ever taken by the pioneers of the field, people like Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre and Nicephore Niepce. It’s interesting to read about how the field of photography was first developed and how it evolved.

It’s also interesting to read about how people viewed and used photography. People like Dr Guillaume Duchenne used it document his medical experiments, while Sarah Bernhardt used it to jump start her struggling acting career.

Some of the pictures are icons because of there subject matter. Such as the picture of Emperor Maximilian’s shirt, taken just after he’d been executed by a firing squad, or the picture of twelve dead communards, one of the few pictures showing victims of the purge that followed the fall of the Paris Commune.

There is a wide variety of pictures and photographic styles, ranging from mundane to awe inspiring. Along with the descriptions of the story behind the picture this makes it a very interesting book to flick through.

Unfortunately the author can’t include every picture so inevitably while reading it you find yourself thinking of all the pictures which should have been included, but which weren’t. For me the two which I think should have been in the book are Vietnam Napalm Girl and The Unknown Rebel. For me those are both much more iconic of the twentieth century than some of the ones in the book, but that’s just my opinion and you know what people say about those.

So this book is a good if rather heavy (both literally and figuratively) read.