Dinagyang Festival Photos 2008 – Celebrating 40 years of Dinagyang

I know everyone has posted already but i just got back to work and had to get a few things out of the way.

Here are some Photos of the Dinagyang 2008. Celebrating 40 years of the Festival! This festival is celebrated on the 4th Sunday of January each year! Rain or shine! photos below show you some street dancing in the rain..

Camera: D300

Lens: Nikon 70-200 AFS VRÂ F2.8

Photos here are actually from the 1st Contingent.. Can someone remember the name? leave me a message..

more photos coming up soon!

more Dinagyang Photos at Photo.net.ph

Nikon D3 Review and Test – Dave Takes on the D3 vs Canon’s MK III

Dave takes on the D3 and here is his review.

Nikon D3 User impressions by Dave Deluria
D3 review unit courtesy of JPRacing (Thanks JP!)

Like my last D300 mini-review, I would first put on the record that I am in no way as qualified as some of our other more popular sources of information regarding camera gear. However since the response to my writing hasn’t led to villagers lighting torches and waving their pitchforks at me, I’ll press my luck and write some more.

Since it’s announcement last August of 2007, the internet has been a great source of information regarding this new flagship model and I trust you can google all the specs of this camera and what it can do.

Although that is all good, it has always been my desire to provide a voice (albeit a small one) to our small but talented community of hobbyists and professional photographers to the world just to prove that even here in the Philippines we do have the means to stay abreast with tools that affect the way we create images.

I. Look and Feel.

After picking up the D3 for the first time, one would get the impression that it generally has the look and feel of previous flashship Nikon DSLRs like the D2Xs and the D2Hs. The screen is big, the grip is big, there’s a bulbous prism on the body that in comparison to lower models look like a runaway cancerous growth and it doesn’t even have a pop-up flash. This is no girlie-man camera and I would understand why my significant other was totally uninterested to hold it longer than she had to to take a picture.

Having owned and used the D40, D80, D200 and now the D300, as you snake your way upward the model range, more and more buttons seem to be available to the user. I would submit to you that although this might seem like a gadget geeks nirvana having a camera with as much controls as a small aircraft, these buttons all have a purpose and those who take the time to master it will be rewarded.

Since owners of the D2 series will NOT have a problem operating the D3, I will just inform you my own impressions as a non-D2 user;

1. The D3 retains the same playback interface on the D200/D2.

If you guys remember my mini-review of the D300, Nikon apparently listened to complaints from D200 users that navigating through the images you have shot with the D200 was…well… unintuitive compared to the D80 or the D40. However for the D3, they have maintained this approach of NOT having dedicated magnify/zoom-out buttons. I am speculating that D1/D2 users already know the process by heart and changing it to accommodate prosumers/hobbyist would have been more trouble than just keeping the Professional photographers happy.

2. The Top LCD doesn’t have as much information displayed.

Call me stubborn, but I still like to check what my camera settings are using just 1 screen. As of date, I have NEVER met a Nikon owner of a D2 series camera just having 1 body. Usually, they have multiple bodies consisting of a D2X with a D200 or D80 as backup. The problem is by removing some of the important top LCD information like what focusing mode and what kind of image format you are currently using that is shown makes it harder to shift between the D3 and the D200/D300. Yes there is a INFO button that can display more settings using the preview LCD, but again there’s nothing better than just having all the pertinent shooting settings available in just the top LCD.

3. D-Pad position.

I have small hands (I blame my folks). On the D300 Nikon graciously provided a 2nd D-Pad on the new battery grip so that one can easily reach it even if the camera is in portrait orientation. However since the D3 is built with both horizantal and vertical grips, it doesn’t make sense to me to NOT either have a bigger D-Pad so one can comfortably reach it in both horizontal or vertical orientation or provide a dedicated D-pad one can easily reach if the camera is being used in portrait mode.

Other than that, I guess I really just have to get my fingers elongated surgically or accept the fact that the demographic for this model doesn’t apply to asians with smaller stubbier fingers.

Other fun features that hobbyists may never use but Pros can is the voice annotation feature. It basically allows the user to attach voice messages to images. At first I thought that maybe useful 1% of the time, but from actual field use by some Professionals, they just love the facility.

Example:

On a runway fashion shoot, the Photographer can annotate his images so that he can identify models wearing clothes coming from which designer came from so he doesn’t have to answer to his or her boss why so-so image wearing a dress made by so-so designer was wrongly identified causing problems for both the photographer and the publication who made the error. Personally, I would only probably use it to store my last will and testament if I am dying of frostbite shooting in the Andes mountains in Peru or something.

As with the D300, the new rear LCDs on this model is amazingly vibrant and accurate. Nikon really showed the other manufacturers that it’s not just image quality that affects how an owner feels about his purchase, but providing a really good LCD that gives you the confidence you are doing well in real time and not have to depend on the computer to show you how bad or well you did. Chimping has never been so much more enticing than ever.

One last thing, I found that the unit having 2 CF slots quite nifty. Initially I thought it was only used to make sure the camera could store images in the spare card if the primary card was full, but this thing actually allowed to you separate image types, RAW on 1, JPEG only on the other and other permutations you might like to do.

II. Enough talk! Let’s shoot!

After taking off the lens cap and peeking through the viewfinder for the first time, one is blown away at how big it is. No more does one need to press one’s eye deep in the viewfinder and squishing your nose on the LCD to compose. In FACT, I was quite comfortable not having skin contact with the eyepiece at all.

On my first shoot. I chose to keep the camera on Program Mode and use Auto-Everthing On. This basically means I let the camera decide the best combination of shutter, aperture and ISO. Where this camera differs is that it allows one to use ISO up to 6400 using Auto-ISO and I can boost it to a whopping 25600 if I have to.

Note: I have uploaded FULL JPEGS for this review, you may click the image to download full size versions.

First up is using the NEW Nikkor 14-24 F2.8 <N> lens with Nano CrystalCoat.

14mm, ISO200

14mm, ISO2000

14mm F2.8 (I can actually see BOKEH on a ULTRAWIDE!)

14mm F2.8 (Yup that’s BOKEH alright)

I have seen all the oohs and aaahs on the net about how clean the images are even using these seemingly ridiculously high ISO settings and I do concur with their findings. However, what they all probably don’t mention is that in actual use, it’s quite difficult to find a situation wherein I had to shoot at 25600! I was out at night with some friends showing them the D3 and for the life of me, as long as one could still make each other’s faces using the available light, I never really needed to boost the ISO beyond 6400 at all and I was just pushing the camera to use the higher ISO settings just for the heck of it and not actually having to need it.

ISO 10,000!

ISO 1100 with distortion test (not baaaad!)

ISO 1100 perspective test (Watch out that your feet isn’t in the shot!)

And this was my most shocking image;

Doesn’t look impressive? In reality I shot this handheld at ISO6400 and there was absolutely no light at all. It was like walking into a dark closet and seeing if the camera can turn night into day

III. Performance.

One of the advantages of using a beefy camera is that the added heft really helps stabilize it and minimizes the effect of the shutter moving up and down (called shutter slap) that may introduce blur at low shutter speeds. My unscientific testing indicates I can safely handhold a D200/D300 to around 1/50 shutter speed using a 50mm focal length while the D3 allowed me to shoot at around 1/30. That doesn’t sound like much, but some might also not understand why Formula 1 teams spend $100,000 on a spoiler for their cars just to shave of a fraction of a second.

One of the really different things one does notice immediately between the the AF implementation on the D3 vs the D300 is that the focus points on a crop sensor camera extend farther into the left and right of the viewfinder (almost till the edge). Since the full frame camera has twice the coverage, the focus points are all located 1/3 from the left and right of the viewfinder. Depending on the situation, this means there is some real advantages to sticking with a D300 vis-Ã -vis a D3. For example when I use the 3D tracking AF feature that I mentioned in my D300 review, as soon as the subject hit the outermost focus point and it began to track it, I could comfortably let it move across the horizontal plane and it just seemed I had points across the viewfinder to let it wander from extreme left to right or vice-versa. However, when you put this same focusing system on a full frame, you really had to conciously keep the subject being tracked within the bounderies since the viewfinder shows such a wider field of view (FOV) that I have not felt since I had a go at the Canon 1Ds MK II some years ago.

One of the dirty little secrets that Full Frame users don’t want you to harp on is vignetting and light fall off. These 2 issues only came to the forefront of users minds when the first full frame digital sensors came out. Basically the problem is that lenses made for film just don’t act 100% the same when attached to digital full frame cameras. There’s a really long explanation out there on the net but in a nutshell trying to make full frame digital sensors behave the way as their film brethren used to do has been a challenge for the engineers of camera manufacturers making full frame sensors.

I won’t let Nikon off the hook though because I did experience viewfinder light fall off in the corners (using a 70-200 VR) but it did NOT show up in the image.

Nikon in it’s wisdom probably found this out in it’s early development of full frame digital sensors and painfully decided to take more time to refine their own method to deal with it.

And deal with it they did.

My initial impression was that the reason Nikon launched the 14-24 and the new 24-70 was to probably hide the fact that their former 17-35 and 28-70 lenses would vignette and exhibit light fall off. Through the help of other Nikon users who had access to all these lenses, I was able to test the venerable 17-35 and found that not only was it minimal and will only phase the most ardent pixel peeper.

Further reading indicates that this is what the EXPEED processor does. It is not just a marketing ploy to counteract what other manufacturers do by putting fancy shmancy names to camera parts that the end user really has no idea what it does (but heck it sounds cool).

EXPEED does the extraordinary work of minimizing light fall-off at the corners using FX lenses as well as addressing lateral chromatic aberrations which I did notice on the D300 (also equipped with EXPEED). It also most probably true that all the benefits of EXPEED only come into play when one shoots JPEGs. RAW images by it’s very nature means the camera dumps the data from the sensor directly onto the memory cards hence bypassing any benefits EXPEED does including the noise reduction performed on high ISO images.

I’ve NEVER been a fan of Capture NX and even though I have installed it since getting a free copy in my D300, I’ve never used it and until native support for NEF files appear on my own Apple Aperture program, I’ll be happy shooting JPEGs for now since I paid for the EXPEED in the cam.

IV. FX or DX?

Now that I’ve had Nikon’s current king of the hill for both DX and FX formats, the venerable question arises;

Why should I care about DX and FX?

You should because for the most part almost everybody in the Philippines who started off with digital cameras NEVER experienced the real attraction of the 35mm format in it’s true incarnation of film.

And I’m not talking about those old dinky P&S film cameras you can still buy in the corner photo lab. I’m talking about SLRs (no D). If you already know what aperture sizes and shutter speeds do to affect your image, you will probably realize that the larger the sensor, the shallower the Depth of Field.

Take the following image shot at F2.8

If I didn’t tell you this, to the uninitiated, they might have thought I shot this using lenses with apertures of F1.8 or wider. The fact of the matter is that a FX sized sensor has 1.5x shallower Depth of Field than a DX (APS-C) camera. Now whether you think this matters to you is of course dependent on your personal preference but staunch film users (like my younger brother) have NEVER really been happy about the digital revolution due to the loss of DOF and poorer dynamic range of digital compared to film. With the D3, all these issues have been put finally to rest and they finally need a new reason to say to me why they prefer to stick with film.

That’s why I was surprised the 14-24 at F2.8 still showed some BOKEH. On a crop-sensor DSLR, there isn’t really any point to using a F2.8 lenses on the ultrawide side because the field of view is much narrower. Bokeh increases from the center to the edge of the frame and on a full frame camera, it just makes the circle of confusion so much more pronounced.

If I buckled down to it and got myself a D3. I would probably not mind NOT having the fancy prime lenses that start at F2 and wider just because finally a F2.8 lens can deliver the bokeh and foreground isolation I love so much. If I stick with the DX format (coz’ I don’t have the money ha ha ha), I WILL have to keep around some prime glass like my 50mm F1.4 just to achieve some creative shots I love to do.

Also for those who aren’t aware, even though Nikon now has a FX (Full Frame) camera, I have to applaud them for stubbornly sticking to their core belief that “As long as it mounts, it will work” approach to their lens line. Unlike the confusion and procrastination EOS users face whether or not to buy EF-S or stick only to EF lenses, Nikkors work.. they just plain work whether it’s a FX or DX camera and backward compatibility means I don’t render any of my previous lens purchases instantly obsolete.

V. What was I thinking?

Currently, I am pretty invested in DX lenses. Although I know the D3 allows for owners to attach their DX lenses directly on the body and work in a mode called ‘Crop Mode’ (similar to High Speed Crop mode on the D2H/D2X), it was nice of Nikon to put an option in the menus to turn it off.

So, let’s see what DX lenses look like on a FX body. It might give you an idea what EF-S lenses would probably look like on a FF Canon

First Up… Nikkor 10.5mm Fisheye;

Next up is the Nikkor 12-24 F4 DX @ 12mm with the hood ON.

But wait… let’s see how much I can zoom to eliminate the vignetting…
12-24 F4 @ 19mm

And lastly my favorite DX lens the Nikkor 17-55 F2.8 (no HOOD). 17mm

At 30mm, I can still see it…

VI. The Showdown.

Thanks to the loads of fanboys on the internet, what initially turned out as a full blown showdown between the D3 and Canon’s MK III, I have actually come out of this experience even more wiser than ever.

Since Nikon intends this model to take up the challenge to regain some market share lost to the Pro Sports, Photojourn segment. I have to comment on the following experiences I encountered during the shoot.

I really need a MANUAL and read some more!

Without the help of Ken Go, I would have probably failed miserably yesterday. Master Ken brought with him YEARS and YEARS of experience shooting with Nikon gear so I ended up like Lightning McQueen with Ken as the Hudson Hornet tweaking the wazoo out of the camera to squeeze every ounce of shooting performance out of it.

In the initial post, I said this is no girle-man camera. I take it back! Compared to the MK III + 70-200 F2.8 lens, this setup is way lighter and I fared more relaxed continuously hefting it for the numerous heats we were shooting. Even though the MK III was balanced, it was quite uncomfortable to keep it at eyelevel at the end of 10 laps.

I have gained newfound respect for the D2 series of cameras
I must admit I did personally feel that using the D2 or the D2h at 4MP to keep up with the MK IIN was lopsided because I felt that anything below 6MP was just too low for today’s more demanding customers but after shooting at 11FPS using the D3 in crop mode. I too won’t close my eyes to picking up a D2 now that it’s getting cheaper for this purpose.

As to low light performance. To heck with being polite. Sorry Canon, but the new king of High-ISO isn’t a 5D or the MK III. It’s the D3. 2006 is probably the last year that Canon can make this claim as the champ for low-noise. As of this writing, Nikon firmly has the lead in this department both in the FX (Full Frame) and the DX (APS-C) department. Time will tell if Nikon can hold on to this claim because as I write this Canon is probably just finishing up and preparing to launch it’s next series of products to replace the Canon 400D as well as the aging Canon 5D which is intended for consumers/prosumers.