The Pro­fes­sional Pho­tog­ra­pher — © Copy­right 2010 by William Beem

Which Cam­era Should I Get?

I’ve been giv­ing thought to which cam­era I should get next. There are two on my radar and each one solves a dif­fer­ent prob­lem for me. Of course, being torn between want­ing two dif­fer­ent things is a prob­lem of it’s own. When that hap­pens, there’s a quote from Kelly Bundy on the old “Married…with Chil­dren” show that always comes to mind.

“I’m sit­ting on the horns of an enema.”

Both of the cam­eras I’m con­sid­er­ing have been out for a while, even long enough for some refur­bished mod­els to hit the shelves.

• Nikon’s D800
• Sony’s NEX-​7

These are very dif­fer­ent cam­eras that solve dif­fer­ent prob­lems for me. Mind you, my Nikon D700 works just fine. It’s not giv­ing me any prob­lems at all. So why am I won­der­ing which cam­era I need when I have one that works fine? That’s where the prob­lems come out to play.

As much as I like my D700, it’s heavy. The lenses for it are also heavy. It’s really cool that this cam­era has such great low light per­for­mance that it can prac­ti­cally see in the dark. I also love the con­trols that I can change quickly with­out hav­ing to dive into menus. On the other hand, it’s a pain to lug around all day and it’s rather con­spic­u­ous. Many peo­ple see it as a “pro­fes­sional” cam­era. That’s the excuse they give when some­one tells you that you can’t take a pic­ture with your cam­era, but they ignore the tourist next to you with a small point & shoot cam­era. Hav­ing a light cam­era that is rel­a­tively incon­spic­u­ous and takes great pho­tos can be a tremen­dous advan­tage. The Sony NEX-​7 does all of those things, and it doesn’t suck that the body-​only price is a third of the cost of the Nikon D800.

How­ever, the D800 is just a lus­cious cam­era with large files, rich col­ors and out­stand­ing qual­ity. It also shoots at a native ISO 100 and goes down to ISO 50, where my D700 has a native ISO of 200. That’s very handy for some of my por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy. I also like the large range of auto-​exposure brack­et­ing with the Nikon. Some folks have com­plained that it takes a photo at every stop, but that’s the way I pre­fer to use it.

The Sony NEX-​7 had an unde­sir­able limit for auto-​exposure brack­et­ing when it came out. Three expo­sures, not even a full stop apart. For some­one who likes to do HDR, that’s just a bit of extra work. Doesn’t mean that you can’t work around it, but it’s not as con­ve­nient as the Nikon auto-​exposure brack­et­ing. When Sony recently released a firmware update to change it’s brack­et­ing to use whole stops — even to skip by two whole stops — plenty of own­ers were very pleased. Even more impor­tantly, they won­dered why in the world Nikon couldn’t (or wouldn’t) release a firmware update to give its cam­eras the same abil­ity to shoot brack­ets in two-​stop incre­ments. Although I may like using each stop, oth­ers with the D800 were con­sum­ing card space for expo­sures that they didn’t need for their work­flow. At 75mb per expo­sure, that space adds up.

The NPS Attraction

There’s another part of buy­ing Nikon that attracted me, but was recently cast into doubt. One of the cri­te­ria to become a mem­ber of Nikon Pro­fes­sional Ser­vices (NPS) was to have two pro­fes­sional bod­ies and three lenses. I have the glass, but I sold off my D200 and lacked another body. Despite the fact that it’s just com­mon sense to have a sec­ond body in case one fails, the other thing that weighed on my deci­sion was get­ting into NPS. I appar­ently had a mis­con­cep­tion as to what ben­e­fits that would pro­vide, though.

A cou­ple of days ago, I read a post by Trey Rat­cliff about his bad expe­ri­ence with Nikon Pro­fes­sional Ser­vices. You can click through to read his arti­cle, but the short story is that he had a cou­ple of sit­u­a­tions where his gear needed repair and NPS refused to help him. My under­stand­ing was that NPS helped its mem­bers with expe­dited repairs and early access to new gear. How­ever, he couldn’t even get his new cam­era before a friend got his at retail. His expe­ri­ences make me won­der just what the hell advan­tage one should expect from NPS. Accord­ing to their web site:

Nikon Pro­fes­sional Ser­vices pro­vides valu­able assis­tance for pros in every seg­ment of the pho­tog­ra­phy field, includ­ing news­pa­per, indus­trial, police and foren­sic, med­ical pho­tog­ra­phy, com­mer­cial stu­dios, audio-​visual pro­duc­tion houses and even spe­cial movie productions.And, of course, we’ve long been known for our inten­sive cov­er­age of field events. NPS is also avail­able to work with national pho­to­graphic orga­ni­za­tions offer­ing advice and assis­tance, demon­strat­ing the lat­est Nikon prod­ucts, and lec­tur­ing on var­i­ous pho­tog­ra­phy top­ics. Let NPS help you take the world’s great­est pic­tures. Nikon under­stands that your prod­uct is very impor­tant to you. To expe­dite ser­vic­ing your prod­uct, you may access Nikon Pro­fes­sional Ser­vices is avail­able only to bona-​fide, FULL-​TIME pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers. There are absolutely no costs involved in join­ing NPS, only impor­tant ben­e­fits designed to help you.

Gram­mat­i­cal mis­takes aside, this descrip­tion is fairly vague. There’s a ref­er­ence to pro­vid­ing expe­dited ser­vice for your prod­ucts, but Trey’s expe­ri­ence with a cou­ple of Nikon prod­ucts was any­thing about expe­dited or even ser­viced. Basi­cally, he now has a bro­ken cam­era and lens that NPS refuses to fix. How is this a ben­e­fit to bona-​fide, FULL-​TIME pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers? Based upon the responses I’ve ready to Trey’s story, Canon pro­vides a much bet­ter ser­vice for its pro­fes­sional cus­tomers. This isn’t a fac­tor in favor of get­ting the Sony NEX-​7, but it’s one less fac­tor in favor of get­ting a Nikon D800.

I’m glad that Trey shared his expe­ri­ence. It’s changed my per­cep­tion a bit about my next cam­era deci­sion. Now my deci­sion is a bit sim­pler. Do I want a light and incon­spic­u­ous cam­era for HDR, or do I want a cam­era with lower ISO for por­traits? It would be great to have both, but I may end up lean­ing more toward the Sony solu­tion now.