excitations stock

Before you get all excited and prepare yourself for an in depth report of both cameras, let me tell you a couple of things. I’m a working photographer. My day to day shooting kit is basically Canon, with a 1Ds III as my main camera. Been using Canon for a long while so yes this will be somewhat biased. Secondly, I tried these two pieces of kit out because I intend to by some new gear shortly and wanted a hands on with the best both camps have to offer at this point in time.

I didn’t organize to shoot side by side tests, yeah I know you’re disappointed but I’m not a bench test optical chart kind of photographer. Instead I took both cameras out on separate jobs. Jobs that I knew would push my current gear to the limits and maybe beyond. After all there is not a lot of sense in buying new kit that is only up to the standards of your current gear. For me lately a lot of my shooting has been available light work. Or should I rephrase that and say not a lot of available light.

So I use my Canon 1Ds III at ISO 1600 regularly but for all practical purposes that’s the cameras upper limit, 3200 ISO is a way out there in La La land, for the stuff I mostly shoot. Being a Canon guy, I’d heard a lot about the Nikon and its low light prowess, and a quick look at its on paper specs told me that I should expect it to preform well. Logic said it would outperform the Canon. I mean 12 million pixels on a bigger sensor has to give the Nikon an edge. So in an attempt to be totally fair, I took the Nikon on the harder of the two challenges. As it turned out much harder. But hey… if this camera is as good as the Nikon people would have us believe, a bit of handicapping isn’t that unfair…. right.

So to test the D3s we headed down one of Melbourne’s graffiti covered lanes, way after sunset, fitted a new 24mm f1.4 Nikkor and started to wind up our ISO. Had a lot of fun with our beautiful young lady models posing with the graffiti artworks. All the time making our way deeper into the ally looking for more darkness. Finally ending up in a place where I was happy. Our Male model arrived about this time, which turned out to be perfect. My idea was to shoot a series of portraits lit entirely by the light of a cigarette lighter. Just to make things harder for the D3s I decided to leave exposure set to aperture priority and left everything to the camera. Normally I would have metered manually and set the exposure to manual.

D3s f1.4 24mm Nikkor lens, ISO 6400. Main light from lighter, background lit by a street lamp 100 metres away.

I was a bit surprised at how well auto exposure worked on the D3s. A flickering light from a cigarette lighter isn’t exactly the most constant of  light sources but the Nikon D3s hung on all the way and kept nailing  exposures, frame after frame. Holding focus most of the time as well which was a bit of a surprise also. I chickened out at 6400 iso, but playing later, now realize that I could have gone up to 12000 iso. Prints made from the series above showed good shadow detail and held their highlights well. Print quality on 10 x 15″ prints was, to be honest amazing…. way better than I would have ever thought possible.

For our Canon test we headed to another laneway in Mebourne’s CBD, accompanied by two beautiful young women as our models. Available light in this location was fully 3 stops better than the location used for our Nikon shoot, however we had to contend with very light rain which created a lot of extra reflections  off the roadway. I offer this as  partial excuse for some focus problems that we were to encounter. For the duration of our shoot, the Canon 1D IV had difficulty in holding focus in what was admittedly low light conditions. I had expected this camera to handle focus considerably better than it did. Certainly in normal daylight it functioned really well but in low light the Canon 1D IV struggled in the focus department. My only wish now is that I’d tried the 1D IV under to same conditions as we shot with the Nikon. I’m wondering whether it would have been able to preform at all.

Canon have paid the price for packing more pixels onto a smaller sensor as well. Although image quality is good under low light conditions, it isn’t a D3s if you know what I mean. Which for me is a problem, because I’m a Canon guy.

1D IV with 70-200 f 2.8 1600 iso , fill flash from a small softbox. Lots of reflection from road, and a few focus issues.

So after shooting with both cameras under a variety of conditions, what do I think? Well if I was shooting video with my DSLR I’d be really happy with the Canon 1D IV, in fact if most of my still shooting was in good light, I would have no issue with adding yet another Canon pro series body to my growing collection of cameras. I was a little surprised at the 1D IV’s reluctance to focus well in low light, but I could easily just switch to  manual focus as most often I don’t shoot fast moving stuff.

We’re nit picking really because to be honest both of these picture making machines are fabulous pieces of kit. I’m frankly a little disappointed that the Nikon D3s is so very good. Even more so when I see the files coming from the new f1.4 24mm Nikkor lens. I hadn’t ever expected this Nikon gear to be so sweet to use. Another point I’d like to make is that as a Canon shooter I would never have expected the Nikon D3s to feel so good in my hand or for it to have such a logical menu and interface.

This brings me now to file sizes, and while to many people, 12 million little light receptors in the Nikon D3s may be just to few for comfort, I’m pretty comfortable with that size for most of my shooting. Will I change camps…. I honestly don’t know. If money wasn’t an issue the answer would likely be yes. So maybe I’ll stick with my current kit or maybe I’ll switch to the D3s as my main camera, and look at a medium format solution for those times when I need big files and loads of resolution.