Blue Skies

I can't profess to be much of an analytic pixel peeper, but I do know that it is a real pleasure, perhaps a geeky pleasure, to look at the raw pictures from the D610 compared to the D3200. After doing post processing on the D3200 for the last 11 months or so, with either Nikon CaptureNX 2 or Adobe Photoshop / Elements, every time I open one of the D610 pictures up I expect to see the grain or noise I've become accustomed to with the D3200. But it's not there! (That's a GOOD thing!)

That was one of my complaints about the pics I was getting - just ask my friend Kim (okay, you probably can't really ask her, but you can play along). She'd tell you that I complain a lot about the noise in my pics. She may even tell you I just complain a lot period, but that's another story.

I really wanted a better camera that would get rid of the noise I was seeing. I was really liking some of the compositions I was getting, but not the finished result. They often had too much noise or grain. The D610, with its full frame sensor, promised better image quality (IQ) in principal. It only cost about $2,000 to verify.

I don't know how well the artifacts will show up in these images, but these are 100% crops of screen captures from Nikon ViewNX 2 of some basic sky out of a couple of pictures. They're not from the same sky, or taken on the same day or even at the same time, hence the lack of pure scientific comparison. But, they are representative of what I'm talking about.

This first pic is from the D3200, as you can see, at ISO 100, 55mm focal length, shot at about 4:00 PM. You can see the splotchy quality of this untouched RAW screen capture. When you apply sharpening to this it gets worse, depending on the settings you use. The CaptureNX 2 noise reduction can help but usually at the expense of the rest of the picture. The sky can be blurred, which I've done sometimes, but that's a real pain. Not so much just blurring the sky but creating the mask at the boundary between the sky and whatever else is in the picture. If it's pine trees it really sucks because the jagged nature of the pine trees makes creating a hard to detect mask difficult. At least for me - and I'm really not into the photography for the purpose of playing with software post processing. I'd rather have a better image out of the camera.

Enter the D610. I know this isn't a direct comparison, but it is a 50mm focal length shot of some sky. The time of day is different, location is different, etc., but the white balance is the same, no exposure compensation, 1 stop difference in the exposure time. You'll just have to take my word that this is representative of what I see when I open a D610 RAW image - very little to no noise. It is such a pleasure to open these files and see a well saturated sky without the blotchy artifacts of the D3200. The rest of the picture is similar; the D3200 often has similar noise in any large area of a single color, especially darker colors, and the D610 has only exhibited that rarely. Now, I've only got maybe 600-700 shots with the D610 so far, but I am very pleased with the improvement in IQ.

I have heard the maxim that only a poor craftsman blames the tools, but I can clearly see that in this case the tool makes a significant difference. I've read somewhere else, Ken Rockwell I believe, that good photographers can eek more out of lesser equipment and that amateurs with top of the line equipment often can't replicate the good photographers results. 

While I agree with that to a large extent (Eric Clapton would sound better on my $200 made in Mexico Fender Stratocaster that I would sound on any Stratocaster that Eric Clapton owns), I also like knowing that the equipment isn't hindering me. If I'm using a good camera but getting poor results I know exactly where the blame lies. If I have poor equipment and get poor results it COULD be because of me but it might be the equipment's fault. I like removing that variable so that I know what to blame for poor pictures like the blue sky in the top picture. It wasn't me!