This camera (Nikon D7000) is brilliant to hold and use. Nikon
has done it again and has made the user interface more usable and
streamlined. What to change flash modes. Press the flash pop-up button
and rotate the control wheel. Sweet. Want to change create and use a
User defined mode? There are two. Set your mode up. Go to the menu and
save it. To use it rotate the shooting mode dial to U1 or U2. Presto you
are there. In the D300 and D700 you to have to setup things in the menu
and switch in the menu. Also, there were 2 sets of things you could
change and they were not all inclusive. It was all horribly confusing
and I never used it. Speaking of shooting modes. There is now one
position on the shooting mode dial for scene mode shooting. You change
through the different scene modes with the control wheel and the type
scene shows up on the back screen. Sweet. I can go on and on but
needless to say. Nikon have really improved their interface. One caveat, I
don't think it is quite up to par with the GH1 to change exposure
compensation but still a huge step in
the correct direction in handling.
Just take it for granted that this takes amazing pictures under all
conditions, including low light, and that it contains all the manual
controls that you'd ever want. Instead, here's some things that the camera does that you might not have heard about:
* Built-in EyeFi support
If
you've used EyeFi SD cards before, you probably assumed that it would
work with the D7000, since the D7000 now uses SD cards instead of CF.
But not only do you not have to mess around with SD-to-CF adapters, the
camera is actually EyeFi aware-- you can choose to have it upload or not
upload on a slot-by-slot basis (so you might have it automatically
upload the RAW files you saved to an EyeFi Pro card in slot 1, but not
bother to upload the JPEGs you saved to the EyeFi Explorer card in slot
2), and there is also an icon that appears on the Info display to
indicate that there are files waiting to upload, that the upload is in
progress or disabled, etc.
The Nikon Wifi adapter is going for
$400. A 4GB, class 6 EyeFi card goes for $40. If you really want to move
RAW files, snag the Pro version for $80. Yes, the Nikon adapter does
things that EyeFi can't, but if you just want to get your files onto a
PC without pulling the card, why spend 10X the money?
You're
stuck with the usual limitations of the EyeFi card, but I fully expect
to use this feature a LOT with studio portraits-- yeah, it only takes 10
seconds to pull the card and have Windows recognize that you added it,
then another 5 seconds to eject the card and stick it back in the
camera. But if you just want a quick check that your exposure or focus
is where you want it, wouldn't you rather just hit a single key and see
your last shot, then get right back into the flow? You may want to drop
your JPEG file sizes to speed up the transfer.
* In-camera RAW file processing
The
camera contains a ton of built-in settings, in addition to the basics
like Standard, Normal, Landscape, etc, you also get all the various
Scene modes, which are basically variations on those main settings.
RAW
processing allows you to see how the shot would have looked had you
used one of those other modes. In other words, you shoot in Normal,
which basically applies no processing to the image, then select the RAW
file, and choose how you'd like to adjust it. You can change the white
balance settings, exposure, basic picture setting (landscape, portrait,
etc), noise reduction, color space, and dynamic lighting. With the
exception of the advanced details on the basic picture settings, you see
a preview of how your change will affect the picture.
If you like it, just hit EXEcute and it writes out a JPEG to your card. Don't like it, just back out and nothing's saved.
This
means that you don't have to worry that shooting in Vivid is going to
result in an oversaturated image, or you can punch something up even
more after the fact. The only real drawback here to me is that it is
going to kick out a JPEG, so if you're planning on doing further editing
in Photoshop, this may not be the best route. But if you're just
looking to go right from the camera to the web, or want to get an idea
of how playing with custom settings will affect your shots, this is a
massive shortcut to taking and then deleting a ton of shots. (And keep
in mind that Photoshop will allow you to mess with most of these
settings when importing RAW files anyway, and the plugin
D7000-compatible RAW plugin had a release candidate posted yesterday, so
you can finally open your RAW shots.)
And a related feature
that's in most other Nikons, but that you might not know about-- you can
define your own basic picture settings. Want something that's
super-saturated and super-contrasty? Just hit a few buttons, choose a
name, and you're done. On the older Nikons, you had to edit the basic
profile itself, now, you can use one as a starting point and adjust from
there. Much cleaner.
* User-defined settings on the control knob
Not
as hidden as the first two, but I can't emphasize how cool this feature
is. Here's the situation I was in last night-- I was shooting a singing
contest in a dimly-lit venue. I was allowed to use a flash, but I
didn't want to constantly be blasting the singers while they were
performing.
I defined one setting as shutter priority, 1/60th,
ISO Hi 2, center-weighted metering & focus, no flash. The second
setting was automatic, ISO auto, full metering and autofocus, flash
enabled. I'd take a couple shots in U2 with the flash, close the flash
down and switch to U1 and shoot a half a dozen shots, then switch back
to U2 and use the flash for a couple more shots. There was no fumbling
for controls, no worrying that I changed the shutter speed without
realizing it when changing between Auto and S-- every time I went from
U2 to U1, all my settings were reset to where I put them before the
event started.
I don't think I ever felt as confident about my
camera settings in a rapidly changing situation as I did last night-
with just a simple twist of a knob, I was able to change to a completely
different shooting configuration with absolute confidence that it was
what I wanted.
To me, the utility of this is almost endless-
I'll probably set up one setting for studio portraits, and the other for
landscape stuff. If I was still shooting news, I'd probably be swapping
between flash and no-flash configurations. For sports, I'd change
between action modes and post-game portraits.
The only thing that
would make this even better would be if I could import and export
settings for later use-- even if you use the "Save/Load" settings option
to back up your current configuration to a memory card, it doesn't
appear that this information is stored. However, it may be a bug in the
Load settings feature, as a number of my settings were incorrectly reset
when I tried to load in settings. Either way, it would work better if I
could treat these like custom basic picture settings, saving them by
name and loading them at will.
* Built-in interval timer shooting
Want
to take time-lapse pictures? Just set up your camera on the tripod,
specify when you want it to start, how many pictures to take overall,
and how many pictures to take each interval and walk away. When it's
time to start taking pictures, the camera will automatically focus and
shoot, then go back to waiting for the next shot. No messing around with
tethering, 3rd party software, whatever-- it's all in the camera, and
it's all super-easy to set up. You'll find yourself taking pictures of
your living room just to see what your cat actually does all day while
you're at work.
* Zoom in live view
This might just be
"new to me," but I found it to be very cool for manually adjusting focus
when on a tripod-- frame your basic shot, then change to live view.
From there, zoom in with the magnifying glass key, and move around the
image with the navigation pad until you find the point you want to focus
on, then manually focus. Since you can zoom into a tiny portion of the
overall image, you can see that you're getting exactly the focus point
you want before you take the shot. One gotcha that I always forget,
though-- don't forget to pick your aperture BEFORE going into live view,
as you can't change it once live view has started.
* Adjustable shooting rate
Again,
might be "new to me," but in addition to blasting away at 6fps, you can
manually adjust that from 1 to 5 FPS in order to get a different
effect. You obviously need to be using a fast enough shutter speed to
support your choice, if you're at 1/2 a second, you're not going to
shoot faster than 2FPS.
As I mentioned in one of my other reviews, I used to be a semi-pro photographer. While I never owned as many cameras
as a true pro would have (that semi- means that I never made enough
money at it to be able to really spring for equipment), I have shot with
a lot of other people's equipment, and I can honestly say that this is
the best camera I've ever used.
