Nikon D7000's ISO levels

With the Nikon D7000, I rarely shoot at higher than ISO 800, but there are the odd times when you just need to push the limits of the camera.  I was in Ottawa this past weekend and ISO 1600 and ISO 3200 was the norm at night.  There was only one place I visited at night--Parliament Hill.  If I could, I would have visited Occupy Ottawa, I was told just east of Parliament Hill.

I did bring my tripod but the night I used it, it was so cold so I did not spend much time on the Hill.  The second night was warmer and was cloudy--great for photography by the way--but I forgot the bring the tripod along so it was all hand-held.  I also had my not-so-fast 18-200mm walkaround lens on.  With a not so great setup, I had to resort to pulling as much juice from the D7000 as possible.

So, hand held, these were some of the pictures I took with the D7000:

50mm, ISO 3200, f/4.8, 1/15 seconds:

18mm, ISO 1600, f/4.0, 1/6 seconds:

18mm, ISO 1600, f/4.5, 1/5 seconds:

18mm, ISO 1600, f/4.5, 1/4 seconds:

D7000

The D7000 is truly amazing. I have been shooting at ISO 3200 and pictures turned out great! In fact, one of my friends printed a photo I shot of his baby girl. I would not have known it was shot at ISO 3200 if I did not look at the photo EXIF data.

The D7000 is quite a camera but there is one design feature that just sucks. It is too easy to accidentally change the shooting mode dialer in the top left. If you don't pay attention to your settings you can easily shoot with the wrong settings for a whole batch of photos. It happened a couple of times already to me. This is the same problem I had with the D80. Why could Nikon not use the design of the D300 on the D7000 body!

Nikon D90

Well, on New Year Eve, I got to play with Jenny's D90. It was a marvel of technology. The look and feel is very similar to my D80 so I had no trouble using the camera. It felt right. Many things about the D90 are the same as the D80. However, what really stood out what the new CMOS sensor. I was astounded by the clarity of pictures taken at ISO 1600. At ISO 1600, pictures taken with the D80 look like crap -- awfully grainy to be of any use except for documentary web pictures. The D90 on the other hand captured what looked like on the big LCD very clear images with very little noise. Qualitatively, I'd say the D90's ISO 1600 is equivalent to my D80's ISO 800. There is clearly a huge gap in system performance.

Well, I hope to see some of the pictures taken last night with the D90 soon!

Happy New Year!

P.S. Despite a camera's lackluster performance in low light conditions, one has to know how to work with its limitations. As we were walking back to the parking lot, I braced myself against pole and took a shot of the CN Tower from the CBC plaza (I think that's what it's called??) with my D80.