Since I have to do without my D3 this week, I took one of my first pictures with the then fairly new Nikon camera from my archive.
It was photographed on a cold, wet Easter day in March 2008. I was in the Eekholt wildlife park with about 20 other Nikon photographers and the falconer only let the birds fly because he also takes photos with Nikon 🙂
I'm showing you the picture for two reasons: firstly - in keeping with the onset of winter in Hamburg - to show that good pictures can also be taken in bad weather. That’s one of my mottos anyway: “Bad weather makes good pictures!”
Secondly, to show the fantastic performance of the built-in 3D autofocus tracking. That was brand new back then, but now this way of automatically tracking the focus is also available in other cameras. (To my knowledge in D300s, D700, D3, D3s and D3x.) The first time I used this AF function, I thought “what is the AF point doing?” It jumps back and forth like crazy on the display. I was all the more surprised that the images were still generally sharp.
For this shot I focused on the bird while it was still perched on the falconer's arm. When the great gray owl took off, all I had to do was leave the autofocus activated and make sure it didn't leave the D3's focus field - and trigger it. Sometimes technology also takes good photos 😉 Only those photographers who had this AF technology built into their cameras were able to take sharp images during the flight. Everyone else had a problem because of the snowfall.
By the way, the picture was taken with a very old AF-S 80-200mm f/2.8, on which the great gray owl tried to land after the flight.
And I learned something else that day that I still regularly pay attention to at weddings today: there is always a garbage bag in my camera bag - so that I don't mess up my clothes when taking photos close to the ground 🙂
My conclusion: it's always worth taking a photo of something every now and then that you wouldn't normally use the camera to see. And I can always learn something from other photographers - even if they photograph something completely different than me.
Say what you will, we photographers are pretty spoiled with the technology available to us today. In the past, you had to approach a picture like this in a completely different way than we can do today. I don't want to be without my D700 either, but when I look at old pictures and start to think about how they must have been created, I have a lot of respect for them.
What exactly is wrong with your D3? Lock over? I noticed this on Twitter with half an eye.
Oh, and before I forget: Thanks for the tip about the trash bag 😉
@Christian Rohweder, I can claim to have photographed sports before the introduction of AF. It worked too 🙂
Yes, the shutter on my D3 is broken. But replacing this is no problem - and it will definitely last until the D5 😉