Jason Tag Photography

So now that I’ve done a couple of shoots and had a chance to play with my new Nikon D80, it’s time to write about the camera and my thoughts about it.

First I have to say that I really like the camera.  The size and weight of the camera feel good.  and the grip seems to be the perfect size for my hand.  The viewfinder is nice and bright, which allows me to really see when my shots are in focus or not.  This would seem like a no-brainer except that on some DSLR’s it seems that they opted to go with a smaller viewfinder image to cut down on costs.  The viewfinder also has a couple of other features which are also quite nice.  One is an indicator which lets you know when the area of the image that falls in the center of the image is in focus.  This feature seems to work whether you’re in auto or manual focus.  The other nice feature in the viewfinder is an indicator which switched between showing you how many shots you have left on your memory card and how many shots remaining in the buffer of the camera.  This is helpful when you need to just shoot and don’t have time to look at the status screen of the camera to figure out what you’ve got left.

In terms of setup for the camera.  I shoot in manual mode with auto-focus turned on.  I try to shoot with ISO 100 but in some situations you just can’t help but shoot a little higher.  I use the auto white balance feature which so far seems to be producing the colors as I see them with my eyes so that’s good.  During my first indoor shoot with the camera, I toned down one of the lights and the images started looking a little blue so I pushed one button and dialed in a user setting of 5000k and was back in the saddle very quickly.  I like that it was easy to switch White balance settings mid-shoot without really slowing me down too much.  most of the other settings on the camera are set to auto.

When I’m shooting nudes I shoot in RAW so that I can fix later if I need to.  I find that when I’m shooting landscapes I’ll shoot JPEG in large file setting and quality set to fine.  Shooting in JPEG will get me more shots onto my cards and I’m not worried about the quality difference because I’m not printing landscapes.  When I shoot nudes I like the to think that there’s a big differenc in quality from the images but I haven’t seen a noticable difference between these two settings.  I’m thinking about doing my next shoot in JPEG just to see if there really is a quality difference.

The Nikon D80 has performed flawlessly on both shoots I’ve done on it so far.  One was outdoor and the was indoor.  At no point did I ever feel like I couldn’t make adjustments quickly based on changing conditions.  And conditions do change quickly when you’re shooting outdoors.   Having a camera that doesn’t slow you down is important.  It’s the difference between getting the shot or missing it.

Battery life on the D80 seems to be great!  When I started the shoot on Sunday morning with Kari, The battery was at 100%.  at the end of the shoot, the battery indicator was around 72%.  I bought a second battery just in case but after the indoor shoot on Monday the battery reported that it had 31% charge remaining.  both of those shoots represent about 5 hours of time in which the camera remained on.  I used the screen to show images to the models on both shoots and in several cases I found myself shooting as many as 10 shots in a single burst.  Since Monday night I’ve taken the camera out a few times to dive into the menus and play with settings.  And to even take a few shots.  I still have about 29% remaining so I have no doubt that the camera is very energy efficient and with my two batteries, I should have no problem with running out of energy on a shoot.

You’re robably wondering when I’ll talk about image quality… well I have to say that the images are great looking.  and it better be for a camera that runs $1200 new.  I’ve been playing with a menu named “Optimize image”.  I found a few ideas on setting up the camera from Ken Rockwell’s site.  He has a wealth of information about the D80 that was extremely helpful in figuring out how best to setup the camera for me.  I’ve been shooting using some custom settings in ths menu and have yet to shoot under the setting of “Normal”  But I will say that the images that I’ve been getting have been superb.  Color reproduction looks great and the images are nice and sharp.  I’m not too worried about quality because I know that most cameras today are really only as good as the person behind them.  I’m not saying that I’m al that great, just that if I set the camera to do proper exposures, then that’s what I’ll get.  If I set it to get bad exposures then that’s what I’ll get.

I write all of this after owning and playing with the camera for a week.  I have about 15-20 hours of shooting time on it so far but in that time I’m able to see that it’s a great camera for what I need.  I think me and my Nikon will be doing many fun things together for quite a while…  I love it!