Michael Williams Going Away Party
April 2004

Other photos


I've always quietly grumbled about the things my old digital camera couldn't do, such as shoot at high frame rates, autofocus quickly, or do interesting tricks with the flash. No more! I finally took the plunge and got myself a Nikon D70. It's cheaper than the previous generation of D-SLRs and has more features than I could ever possibly know what to do with (photo nerd details down below). Karl was throwing a going-away party for Michael, so I decided to take my new camera for a test drive.

Click on any image for a larger version.

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Photo nerd details: Most of the available light pictures you see here were taken at ISO1600. This resulted in serious grainess, but still much better than anything you'd expect from 1600-speed color film. The flash pictures were mostly taken hand-holding my SB-800 flash and using Nikon's clever "commander" mode, where the camera and flash have a conversation about the exposure, firing off test pre-flashes, before taking the final exposure. Everything was shot in Nikon's raw ("NEF") mode and converted to JPEG using Photoshop's Camera Raw.

Issues and workarounds: Some people on the net have griped about the "commander" mode's pre-flashes causing people to blink. It was definitely a problem for a few people, but no worse than you'd expect from common cameras' anti-red-eye tricks. Back-focus, another topic of net-griping, was an issue for me, but mostly because I'm still learning my way around the camera. If you ask it to focus on somebody's nose, the results can be inconclusive. If you ask it to focus on somebody's hair or something else with more texture, the results seem to be better. Finally, I've seen a number of complaints about the D70 underexposing pictures, which I definitely saw, typically from 1-2 stops. Still, if you're shooting RAW, it's easy to fix.


Dan Wallach, CS Department, Rice University
Last modified: Sat 01-May-2004 15:02