Santago Rare Leopards Project

Santago Rare Leopards Project is closing down soon - and I was lucky to get a chance to visit the furballs before they are sent to their new homes. It's a sad tale why this happened but I'm a little heart wrenched right now so I'll just keep my spirits up by blabbering about the d300.



Ocelot with lots of spots!

Yesterday's trip was totally awesome, however the weather wasn't very good. Now, I don't mind rain at all - my gear has been through worse than a little british rain - but harsh sunlight filtering through dense shade is the killer. You'll get areas of darkness and a few spots of detail where the camera tries its best not to blow the highlights. I did keep those raws though, just as memories even though they aren't processed.



Snow Leopard

Got lots of snow leopard shots today - many were taken in to iso 1600, and I was very surprised at how much detail was kept. Granted, it does feel a tad soft, but if that's the price to pay it's fine. High iso performance seriously beats the d200 down real bad.



Black Panther



From the crop, you can see that the detail is still bloody preserved, even in the dark areas. And this was shot at ISO1250.... the furball was moving so I opened up my aperture to 2.8 (I usually leave it at F4) in order to get a little more shutter speed. The flash also helped to bring out the yellow of its eyes.



Now I do have a rain cover, but the rain came down unexpectedly and suddenly, and I was prone in front of the Snow Leopard enclosure.... furball was in a good pose so I continued shooting in the rain. Mainly worried about the flash, but yeah, new camera on its first day out with a baptism of rain.

The exposure metering was the only thing that threw me off from the D200 - the D300's evaluative metering seems to be very aggressive at pushing the histogram to the right when used with flash. Setting a -1/3 ev for ambient metering seemed to do the trick - left it there the whole day and it did perfect. I'd say it actually outdoes the d200. But it's the first day out with it so I'll see how it performs down the road.



The AF module on the camera is stunning. I always thought it was damned annoying of nikon to put all the 15 cross hairs in the center of the frame. That works very well for most focus and recompose people (everyone around was going beep-beep beep-beep...). I started the day with the camera accidently set to Dynamic AF, 9 points, 11 positions. When I realized that, I put it back to Single Point AF - what I usually use - and was quite surprised when the camera started to hunt in low light... on a fast 2.8 lens. I switched back to the 9 point dynamic AF, and it only hunted once, maybe twice on a long day of shooting. Now most of the time I use the off center af points, which are supposedly the non-cross type. So perhaps multiple single axis af points working as a group kicks ass.... can I say I love this AF module? My only quibble is that the af point's locations do not seem to match those on the D200, which I prefer. I'll see how it goes down the road.



The only quibble I have is the lack of ISO100... there are low iso modes on the d300 but I kinda forgot to test them :( In any case, ISO 200 is crippling for the flash in bright sunlight - there were times my shutter speed was in excess of 4 digits with very bright light. GAH!





Bottom line for the d300:
- Superb high iso performance. I will not hesitate to use 1600 at all.
- Superb AF performance. dynamic af works very well.
- Superb build. Actually lighter than the D200.
- Superb battery life - just used one EN-EL3, and I shot at least 1k shots, and I was doing lots of reviews when it was raining, or checking the histogram.

Downsides of a d300:
- no one uses nikon (ok, jokes aside, I was the only nikon user there, everyone else was Canon and Pentax)