A day out with Nikon D7000

Finally I got my hand on a unit of Nikon latest DSLR, the Nikon D7000.  Basically the camera is so hot that it was sold out the moment it arrived in the local store;  I am not going to write a technical review of this camera as you can easily get a very comprehensive review from the internet such as this and this.

My 1st impression with the camera was very positive.  At a low investment like this, you get a very solid camera, with lots of features and fantastic image quality!
In this round, I was invited by G3k Photography to a shooting assignment on 2nd of Jan, 2011 in a Ballet Graduation Concert held in Dewan Sri Pinang, Penang.

Paired with a single 70-200 f/2.8 tele-lense, I set up myself on the platform with about 100m away from the main stage.  I had a hard time getting a pin-on exposure as the stage lighting was arranged in a not-photographically friendly way.  The spot-lights was badly distributed across the stage sections with a lot of colors.

I’ve have no complain on focusing with the d7000’s new module as the contrast of the subject was reasonably good there, I only used AF-S (single shot) here and no continuous-shoot.  The WB was set to Auto in this case as the lighting and color themes changed too fast for me to coup up with.  As it is really dimmed in the stage main-lighting, I had to crank up the ISO to 1600 – 2500 ranges to obtain a shutter speed of 1/160s – 1/250s at aperture of f/2.8 – f/4.

I’ve shot in full resolution jpeg in camera, and had selectively cropped to a better composition.  Minimum color treatment was done, most of the photos from this series, was basically similar to the out-of-the-camera photos.  I also noticed the default Picture Control gave a slightly more saturated colors compare to Nikon D700. So I’ve tuned down a bit in the saturation from the ‘SD’ picture control, and crank up a bit on sharpness as usual.

The performances went on for about 2 hours,  I’ve captured about 400 over shots from the series, and have selected some of my favorite to share with you in the following flash album,

>> Click here to view them now <<

As usual, comments are welcomed and please do share with your friends who might be interested to my photographs.  The photo below is a closing shot I captured using Nikon D700 & 50mm.  As from you can see, the stage was flooded with a warm yellow lights with nothing else,  I am really having a hard time shooting the performances.