Thoughts after spending two days with a Nikon 750 in my hands.

This image has nothing to do with the content of this blog. 

I shot it with my friend, Noellia, for fun. 

It was done with the Nikon D750 and the Nikon 85mm f1.8G lens. 

I've spent the last two days shooting portraits for a company in Georgetown, Texas that does chemical engineering. We photographed 125 of their employees, one at a time, for use on a holiday card. It's an elaborate card that folds out and is used as a primary piece of marketing for the company. 

I set up a nine foot wide, soft blue seamless background and created a lighting design that would make people look good while minimizing skin texture. The background was lit by an Elinchrom 500 watt second moonlight that was suspended from the acoustic tile grid on the ceiling by a scissor clamp. We wrangled the cord over to the wall with a second scissor clamp made specifically for cable wrangling. We did this because the light needed to be exactly there and, as a side benefit, it kept a long cable run off the floor --- which makes for a safer set. 

I brought a flat, white three foot by four foot shiny masonry board for people to stand on. This contained the portrait subjects and kept them in the area that represented the "sweet spot" of my lighting design. It also made each engagement totally repeatable, as far as lighting and exposure were concerned. 

On either side of the subject I had black light absorbers parallel to them. These helped to put a darker edge on the white shirts everyone wore which should radically reduce the post processing work of making clipping paths. 

Finally, I had two 3 foot by 4 foot soft boxes set up as main light and fill light in front of and at 35 degree angles from the subject. These were both up high enough to cast shadows under the chins of my sitters which is a flattering way of defining the chin and neckline. Since the images would be clipped from the background we were highly uninterested in experimenting with shallow depth of field or experiencing the "bokeh" of our taking lens. We shot at f11 in the interest of keeping everything sharp and tidy.

The two front lights were Photogenic Powerlight PL1250 DR mono-lights in Photoflex soft boxes.

My assistant and I had some interesting times during
the shoot. We got everything set up on the first morning and were ready to shoot by 8:30 am. I had my assistant take a meter reading and the Sekonic L-508 meter gave me a reading of f8.0 on both the background and the foreground "target" area with everything set at 1/125th of second shutter speed at ISO 100. But my Nikon D750 showed in both the histogram and on the back screen monitor that I was overexposing by about a stop. We went with the camera's version because I've used the camera frequently and have always been happy with the correlation of its displays and the final look of the images on my monitor in the studio.  But, of course, I was very curious about the disconnect.

When we had time we experimented by changing cameras but still using the Nikon 70-210mm zoom lens I'd chosen to use for the project. The indications on the back monitor were the same on the D810 we'd brought along as a back-up. My assistant suggested that I try a different lens and that's when everything made sense. When I replaced the older zoom lens with a much newer 24-120mm f4G zoom the exposure at f8.0 was in perfect sync with the meter. Apparently the coatings aren't as good on the older, longer zoom lens which causes some residual flare, that, and the ai linkage may be enough to foil the camera's digital metering and cause some issues. Once resolved we continued to use the older lens because it's more flattering and less analytic than newer lenses. Making portraits of real people without a retinue of make-up artists is not an area of the craft where a Zeiss Otus lens is necessarily superior. Not everyone wants to look into every wrinkle and pore....

I chose the 70-210mm f4.5-5.6 AF lens because it's very sharp but in a non confrontational way. It's a flattering lens and the combination of focal lengths was perfect. It also weighs about 1/3 of what my 80-200mm f2.8 lens weighs. Both lenses are equally good at f8-11 so it just makes sense (if you will be holding one all through eight hour days) to choose the lighter version for your own comfort and safety.

Everything went well on the first day and we were able to leave all the lights and background set up when we broke for the evening. We came back this morning and flipped all of the mono-lights back on. We turned the radio trigger on the main flash on ( we were using the built in optical slaves to trigger the other two light...) and we started shooting test frames. We literally changed nothing from last night till this morning but there was a "gremlin" somewhere. When I shot the first test from the bottom half of the frame was totally black. I suspected a sync issue so I dropped the shutter speed to 1/60th of second. That worked perfectly. Then I started working my way back up the shutter speeds to see where the problem would arise. At 1/100th of a second you could see a black line in the bottom 20% of the frame. We changed lenses to see if that would help. Nope. The sync problem persisted. We changed camera bodies but it occurred with the D810 as well.

We finally narrowed in on the radio trigger receiver plugged into the main light. We pulled it down and changed the two triple "A" batteries and put everything back into place. Problem solved. The trigger had enough power to show the "on" indicator but not enough to fill the trigger circuit quickly enough to be effectively trigger the light in the right time frame. Our detour took five minutes but was the "sweaty" moment for me in what was otherwise a very nice and even tempered shoot.

I chose the D750 over the D810 for this particular shoot because of some practicalities. The final images would be used in small sizes and in black and white but like most nervous shooters I wanted to shoot in raw so I could correct small exposure errors and open up shadows without worrying about degrading the files. The D810 raw files are enormous and take too long to process when you have more than a thousand to wade through. The D750, when set to compressed, 12 bit raw has manageable file sizes. Lightroom also sets the color profiles correctly when the files import. As far as image quality goes the D750 is the equal of the D810 if you disregard the difference in resolution.

The image through the finder on the D750 is very good and the focus is fast and sure. Though it wasn't really an issue given that the Photogenic Powerlight PL 1250 DR lights have 250 watt tungsten halogen modeling lamps...

In the same way that part of my lens selection process had to do with overall weight the D750 is quite a bit lighter than the D810 as well. It may not make a difference to you if you shoot casually or keep your cameras in a shoulder bag, pulling them out from time to time to shot a random photograph. Our shoot was scheduled in five minute intervals which meant that the camera and lens combination was only out of my hands for lunch and bathroom breaks from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. Any extra weight makes a difference.

I reviewed the images this evening on my computer. Every frame has sharply nailed focus and perfect exposure. We ended the shoot after two days and 1400 images using the same battery we started out on. All in all it was a comfortable performance from the camera which is great because it means no camera induced drama in the workday.

I like stuff that just works and works well all the time. That would include my two Nikon cameras. I do shoot with other cameras and have come to prefer the Olympus EM5.2 for video. When I'm shooting in situations that call for fast, continuous focus, very high resolution and lots of controlled dynamic range I find myself always reaching for one of the Nikon cameras. They are wonderful work tools --- with the right lenses.

Tomorrow is my day off. I'll need it. We hit the ground running on Monday with a  joint video/photo job for a different client, back up in Georgetown. Monday evening I'll be speaking to a photo business class at Austin Community College that evening and Tues. we head to downtown Austin to shoot executive portraits in an environmental style for a large law firm. It's a tight schedule but that's fun for me. We get a lot done in a short amount of time. And then we get to bill.