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My Nikon D3 lets me do things I've never been able to do, and makes it fast and easy. You don't need a review: unl

ike any other camera I can recalljust talk to anyone who owns the D3 and you'll hear praise gushing like no other camera. The Nikon D3 has no "buts," as in "I love it but..." Everyone just loves it. You'll hear the same thing from any photographer who had his hands on one for just a few minutes. The more someone knows about serious shooting, the more they love the D3.
The D3 just goes. It shoots and you get great images, period. Nothing is slow or gets in your way. It just goes.

The Nikon D3 is a professional news, sports and action camera, but it's decent for landscapes, too.



The Nikon D3 is taking the sports world away from Canon by storm. You can see some great photos hereLe Tour de France, and this shot in particular shows Nikons all over. Remember, magazine ads showing white lenses are stagedphotos, not the real world. Canon makes no full-frame pro sports camera.




The Nikon D3 is a lot more than reading reviews and specifications could ever suggest. Just like theD300, the D3 has image processing tricks that makes it easier to create exactly the image I want over evenmore conditions than ever before. The D3 then adds more speed, more finesse, more lens choices, triple the battery life of the D300 and a real-time viewfinder camera-level display on top of it. The Nikon D3 is the best camera ever made by Nikon. It was announced on August 23rd, 2011. As of the beginning of 2012 it's just starting to trickle into the hands of photographers.
The Nikon D3 excels for news, sports and event photography where you need it to work under any condition. If you get knocked over and knocked out, you'll come up shooting with the D3 even if you're still seeing stars. The D3 just works as an extension of your imagination.
Nikon cameras, even
the range finder cameras of the 1950s, have always been about hand-held use for news and sports. The Nikon D3 is the best of over 50 years of continuous camera and lens development.
The Nikon D3 incorporates many new tricks to let me create visibly better images more easily. It plays many subtle (and not-so-subtle) tricks to let me get bettercolors, better grays, better highlights and better shadows than any previous camera. The Nikon D3 even fixes lateral color fringes in some lenses. The Nikon D300 shares these same tricks.

My D3 really can crank at 9FPS, and the best part is that it only costs as much as every previous pro Nikon camera: $4,999.95.
Canon has nothing close: Canon DSLR are either slower or smaller format. Canon has slower came as with higher resolution more suited to landscape, studio and portraitphotography.
While some people who don't have D3s have the time to fret over reviews and trifle over meaningless details, everyone I know whohas a D3 is marveling at how it just works and lets them come away with great images. It just gets out of our way, which is the greatest compliment any photographer or artist can bestow on any tool. My D3 works in more crazy lighting conditions than any previous camera. I can shoot at ISO 6,400 without any excuses. I can get good color rendition in any crappy lighting, even under orange high-pressure sodium street lights, due to the astoundingly large range of accommodation of the manual PREset (gray card) white balance.
For instance, here's a shot made under moonlight, hand held:
Nikon D3Nikon 28mm f/1.4 AF-D, program auto exposure (1/4 sec @ f/1.4), auto-ISO chose ISO 6,400, tungsten WB to make the sky blue, auto focus. All I did was point and shoot from my usual settings, except for making the critical change to the WB to make the sky blue. What are the white dots in the sky? Those are the stars! 

No other camera could do this without a tripod, much less as a grab shot. Tripods are for wimps. See the dot at the top left? That's a planet. The wide lens, a 28mm true and equivalent on the D3, lets me hand-hold a stop slower than a50mm lens. I easily can get sharp shots at 1/4 second with a 28mm lens, firing a burst and picking then best. This shot is under a nearly-full moon. It's what I was expecting I could do with the D3 and a fast lens. I didn't need the higher ISOs; people with less steady hands might. You could get this, albeit much grainier, at 1/15 at ISO 25,600 at f/1.4. Wait for the really full moon at Zenith and you'll be at 1/30 at ISO 25,600. Not only do I have my D3 set to choose the exposure and ISO automatically exactly as I would do, my D3 easily auto focused all by itself. Except for choosing a tungsten white balance to make the sky blue, if the sun came up my D3 would instantly set itself back to ISO 200 and a more reasonable exposure to grab whatever happened, perfectly.
I always shoot everything on Auto. I spend a lot of time preset
ting my cameras as I want them so all I have to do is point and shoot. A first for Nikon, you can save these settings as files which can be loaded on CF cards and shared among cameras. Here's my usual setup; try copying this NCSETUP2.BINfile to a CF card, stick it in your D3 and use MENU > WRENCH > Save/load settings > Load Settings to copy them to your camera. Watch it; this file is setto mark my images' EXIF data with my copyright info and prefixes the files with my choices of letters, so be sure to change these on your camera if you want them differently.
Better Color top
Like the D300, the Nikon D3 allows me to set more vivid colors than any previous Nikon or Canon I've used.
Cranking up the colors gives me a look I love. It isn't simply blotto saturation. The D3 has a special magic about its colors when cranked up. It warms warm colors just as Fuji Velvia 50 does, without altering the cool colors.
I explain how to crank it at Nikon D3 and D300 Picture Controls.
This great color is enough of a reason to buy a D3 (
or D300). Even a blind person can see the difference–you don't need a microscope : )
GET IT WHILE IT'S ( HOT ) : )
Roll mouse over to see how ADR fixes blown-out, pizz
a-like highlights.
The Nikon D300 and D3, when ADR is set ON, have an uncanny ability to handle huge dynamic ranges better than any other Nikon. The D3 and D300 are the first Nikons that don't go blotto when overexposed. Just like film, being 1/3 or 2/3 stops over just makes the image lighter, not blowing-out facial highlights to look like old pizza! The weakest point in digital capture, even in Hollywood's $250,000 digital cinema cameras which still can't replace film, has been that colored highlights, like sunsets, foreheads and bright stucco walls, turn into bands of weird colors as they wash out to white. The D300 appears to have conquered the problem so its highlights take on the same natural shoulder as film. Look carefully at how the hue of the wall changes from red to yellow as it washes out (ugly), but retains the same hue as it lightens with ADR ON.
These dynamic improvements alone are reason enough to get a D3 or D300.
Double Rainbow. Nikon D3, Nikon Nikkor 13mm f/5.6 AI-s.
The Nikon system includes a 13mf/5.6 n
on-distorting lens made from 1975-1998. There are none available anywhere, but if you have one, you just outdid every other professional SLR system on earth.
Faster and Easier to Use top
The AF system just works. Set to the All Areas dummy mode (the big white rectangle), it really just finds the correct sensors and uses them without you or I having to jack any switches around for each shot.
From a convenience aspect, the larger 3" LCD screen is nice, but far nicer is how much faster playback responds to button presses. I can scroll around a magnified image much faster, and RGB histograms come up instantly instead of bogging down for a full second for each image as they did on the old D200.
OK, I love this part.
Look at this work of art. Does Nikon even
need to say "Giugiaro?" The genius is obvious. Iwant to pick it up and start feeling it all over.
In case you've been dead for the past several decades, Giorgetto Giugiaro also has designed Ferraris and loads of other beautiful things.
You could pay a whole lot more for a piece of sculpture much lesfunctional than a D3. Brava Italia!

 


                                                                                              Way too magenta; AWB was fooled in thisrare case by green shirt.
In two situations photographing my kid wearing a green shirt and then later sitting ona dull green couch, the AWB tried to makegreen into white, and made images far too magenta. No big deal, a few clicks and I shot a manual WB off another white surface for great results (not shown here).


Nikon Picture Controls ...

























Picture Control: VIVID, +3 Saturation.
Whoo hoo! This hotel and sky didn't look this good in person.
Introduction
See why I love to crank my colors?
The Nikon D3D700D300D90 and D5000 let me get wilder colors than any previous Nikon, including film cameras loaded with Fuji Velvia 50.
Not that you want colors this wild, but I do. Art is the expression of imagination, and I dream in very vivid colors. You probably prefer more a polite color rendition.
For people, I turn it down and get creamy smooth skin.
This will show you how to set your camera as you like.
Wording
Back in Nikon's first generation digital cameras, Nikon called the settings for saturation, contrast and sharpness "Optimize Image."
As of late 2007, Nikon's second generation cameras now call these settings
"Picture Control."
Don't let Nikon's typical lack of clarity confuse you. Picture Controls are simply the settings for contrast, sharpness, saturation and etc.
Canon also calls them something else each year, like User Defined (2002-2006) and now Picture Styles (2007).
How to Set Color Saturation
Press MENU.
Select SHOOTING ME
NU (camera icon on left).
Go right (into the menu selections) and go down to the
next page to SET PICTURE CONTROL.
Go right to the four standard options, and click two down to VIVID.
VIVID is a good option. VIVID is similar to the wildest way I could set earlier first-
Since I want colors loud enough to deafen a heavy-metal drummer, I crank it up from VIVID.
Once at VIVID, click right to the menu with the sub-options of
Saturation and Contrast.
Click down to Saturation, and peg it three clicks to the right.
Hit OK, otherwise your modification isn't remembered.
You now have altered the VIVID s
I always set Adaptive Dynamic Range (ADR, mislabeled as Adaptive D-Lighting by Nikon in the menus) to AUTO (or NORMAL in the D3 and D300). This sets the contrast and brightness automatically based on the Zone System, removing those choices from your menu options.etting to its maximum. In the menus you'll now see it called VI*, the * signifying that you've messed with Nikon's default for VIVID.
















In this example, I moved forward and back to keep the same framing.
You can see the background changed size.








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