Stephen Buckman wrote:
Not on a lot but more of a reader on the list. I do have some questions about some digital cameras and would like some feedback. I am planning to purchase either the Canon 5D MKII, Nikon D300 or a D700. What make doesn't matter but I am concern about printing fairly large. (20 by 30) I primarily do landscapes, macros, and some wildlife (birds or in flight) Would like to do more birds. I really don't know where to begin. I hear that full frame cameras are not best for bird photos. I would probably get a zoom 400 or fixed 400/500 with teleconverter. What lens would work in autofocus as I have heard most only work in manual or am I stuck with manual? So to make it short, what camera would be best for everything I do. Thank you
Your requirements are expensive :-). Landscapes, even as small as 20x30 (oh, it's big, it's bigger than all but 5 prints I've made in my life, but I've seen how the high end has moved to big prints in the last decade), benefit from all the resolution you can offer from a DSLR. I've got 20x31 (image area; 24x34 or so including borders) prints made from 6mp and 10mp DSLR originals that get very good responses from people. But if you walk up and look, it's also clear that more resolution would have been even better. 35mm wasn't really good for that big an enlargement, and digital is somewhat better, but not so spectacularly as to make it obviously good enough.
This argues for the 5DII, obviously. It's, what, 21MP? Whereas the D700 is 12MP. That's actually a big enough difference to be noticed if you're printing big (though not as much as a 2x increase in print size). Birds in flight really stress the AF system for both speed and accuracy. The D700 AF is the exact same system as in the D3, and is a big improvement over the 5DII AF from everything I've heard (I've only directly compared against the original 5D). This argues for the D700.
However, birds and wildlife in general are telephoto subjects, which argues for a DX format camera, not full frame. I don't know if the D300 AF is better than the 5DII AF. It's not as good as the D700.
Canon's "intermediate" body, the 5D, is biased more towards studio or landscape work than towards photojournalism or wildlife. Nikon's intermediate is definitely a photojournalism specialist (low light, not that extreme resolution, really good AF). To get high resolution, you have to go to Nikon's flagship D3x, and that's priced as you might expect. It does have BOTH the resolution AND the very good AF, though.
The 400/2.8 and 500/4 (or 600/4) modern lenses from Nikon and Canon are AF, and very good AF. They're also EXTREMELY expensive, to the point where saying "why not buy both bodies" doesn't change the bottom line as much as you might wish. But to be serious about wildlife you *definitely* need to go to some pretty extreme lenses, especially for birds. Printing that big is causing me to assume you're pretty serious; hope you're seriously funded as well, or the compromises get very big.
At a much cheaper level, I'm pretty happy with the Sigma 120-400/4.5-5.6 zoom. It's AF-S on my Nikon D700, so it focuses fairly quickly for a cheap slow zoom. It cost me under $800, whereas the super-telephoto primes are mid-4 figures to low 5 figures, which I couldn't possibly consider in any forseeable future that doesn't involve winning the lottery. I decided it was a better way to reach 400/5.6 than putting a 2x on my Nikkor 70-200/2.8 (based on testing with a 1.7x on it).
-- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
