Nikon D3 examples

I’m starting to really like the D3 images which are extremely smooth and delicate, indeed stunning now that I’ve dialed in appropriate sharpening. Color can be astonishingly pleasing with some images, and not as pleasing with others—I’m still trying to figure that out. And it’s very clear that the D3 images have incredibly high pixel quality very receptive to further processing.

I shot some personal images (family) this morning which I won’t be posting, but I’m extremely impressed with the “poise” of the images, their depth and contrast and realism. Part of it might be the astonishing Nikon 24-70FX zoom, which I’m almost prepared to call the best zoom I’ve ever used, even though my copy appears to be “off” slightly along the left edge.

We had a beautiful white frost this morning in the San Francisco Bay Area. Below is one of my favorite fruits, a Fuyu Persimmon in the blue light of morning. All of these snapshots were taken handheld, perhaps a tripod could have extracted better detail, but I’m not going to restrict myself to posting tripod-only examples, and heck I think they look darn good. No post processing was done other than modest sharpening; additional effort could make them really come alive.

Some photographers sharpen their images for an at-first-glance “zing”; I don’t like such sharpening because subtleties of tone are lost. Evaluating images is best done with minimal processing and sharpening.

Nikon D3 + 24-70FX @ 70mm, f/6.3 @ 1/200 sec, ISO 800, handheld

Nikon D3 + 24-70FX @ 52mm, f/5.6 @ 1/320 sec, ISO 800, handheld

Nikon D3 + 24-70FX @ 24mm, f/8 @ 1/80 sec, ISO 800, handheld