I believe I am set for quite awhile with this new equipment I most recently purchased from B&H Photo. I wanted to get the best of the best in terms of photographic speed and optics for storm/landscape photography. After doing my research, I believe I now own the very best Nikon currently has to offer in terms of super wide zoom + speed + optics. The Nikon D3 is a tank, but man what an awesome piece of equipment. Yes, it cost $5,000 dollars, but this camera is incredible. After some of the reading I’ve done and some of my own very preliminary tests… I now have the freedom of shooting in the ISO 1000 to 2000 territory without having to worry about doing serious "noise reduction surgery" to the final images. The Nikon D3 is a "full frame" sensor, which means no more 1.5x crop factor. All digital SLR sensors, except for the high-end professional cameras, have ~ 24x16mm sensors. Full-frame sensors on the new professional SLRs have sensors ~ 36x24mm. Obviously, this is more surface area for a lens to project light to. What this basically means is a lens labelled as, say 18mm focal length, will have no "crop factor", your image will truly be 18mm. On a DX camera (I’ll use "DX" and "FX" which is Nikon’s lexicon for the smaller digital sensor vs. the full frame). You’d have to multiply 18 by 1.5 to get the resultant "virtual" focal length, which in this case would be 27mm. That is the first reason why I wanted to by the Nikon D3.
The 2nd reason is speed in capturing light. Allow me to explain. All the big hoopla these days is how many megapixels a camera might have. That’s all well and good, and yes, more megapixels = greater resolution and larger possible print sizes of images. The problem is, if you cram too much resolution to a DX sensor, you introduce greater sensitivity to noise. The size of a pixel of captured light on the sensor becomes smaller, thus you’d need greater exposure time to decrease the probability of introducing noise. It’s a pretty simple concept really. Okay, so to resolve this, professional line Nikon and Canon cameras introduced full-frame sensors so that they can increase the megapixel count without having serious noise problems. The Nikon D3 is "only" a 12 mega-pixel camera, but it is a 12 megapixel camera on a FX sensor, which means a much greater surface area per pixel for light to hit. This is a far less sensitive sensor to noise, which basically means you can set the ISO value (camera sensitivity) to values typically not thought of for serious amateurs/professionals, including myself! This is why the D3 is a fast camera. It captures light faster than any other dSLR on the market because of the design of the sensor — the fact it has a great sensor size/pixel ratio.
There’s nothing like matching fast with fast. My primary lens on the Nikon D3 will be the 14-24mm f/2.8 Nikkor. ($1600). This lens is also a tank, given its very large aperture at f/2.8. For storm photography, this is excellent. Obviously, many storm images are taken in low light environment, whether it be the storm itself making it darker or the storm occurring late in the evening (although usually both!). Many times as well, these storms are on the move, and there are many instances where there is little time to set up a tripod, so one must resort to hand-held images. With handheld, you have to watch your shutter speed. The faster the lens/camera combination, the greater your chances of not having to have to resort to low shutter speeds to capture an image while on the move. A fast combination like this is also great for situations where one might wish to get long exposure images of storm structure after sunset, but do not want any motion blur (or very little). There are situations where it’s great to have super long exposure motion blur of clouds, but there are other times when it is not, as well. Super wide and super fast is what serious storm photographers need out in the field. The next post will be some image examples comparing the D3 with my D200.