The bride
Shooting this wedding in India for a friend made it clear that I needed a second camera body for events where I don’t have time to change lenses. Or for when the action is happening so thick and fast, that the time taken to swop lenses would mean losing a shot. Ideally, I would want to put a wide-angle zoom on one body, and a telephoto zoom on the other. That’s a pretty typical photojournalist type setup.
The Groom
I’ve been happy with the cropped sensor of my Nikon D300, but have been eyeing the full-frame D700 for some time. At the same time, I wanted to keep my setup as lightweight as possible, for shooting serious adventures. My choice for a second body came down to getting a full-frame format Nikon D700 or a cropped-format Nikon D90 to complement my existing D300.
Preparations
The advantages of the lighter weight D90 body kind of weighed up evenly against the lower noise images I would get with the D700. I was pretty much sitting on the fence. On some days, I would be leaning towards getting a D700, and on other days, the D90.
Dancing at Home
My breakthrough came with the launch of the Nikon D3s, which although has a sensor with the same number of Megapixels as the older D3, ups the ante with even cleaner images at high ISOs. I looked at this and started thinking that the creation of a ‘D700s’, using the same sensor as the D3s was imminent.
Dancing in the Street
This would seal the deal for me. A D700s would offer a significant image quality benefits over the D90. It would be heavier, particularly with the lenses I would want to use with this body, but if I needed to go lightweight with just one body, I could always just take the D300.
So now I’m waiting, as I’m sure many others are, for Nikon to start selling a camera that doesn’t yet exist …
