Can you remember “593 - Controversy”? Well, this is the same place and the war goes on 🙂
This post had many inspirations. Faced by the new Canon 5D MkII, you can feel a certain tension in the Nikon crowd 🙂 Everybody expected a 24 megapixel camera for Photokina, and what did we get? A 50/1.4. It may be fine, but I doubt it will be better than the new Sigma 50/1.4, though smaller and lighter. 
Paul Lester recently wrote a clever post, “Avoiding occasional G.A.S cramps”, where he fights the lust for a D700 by using the D300 that he has. I have the slight suspicion that he is not yet really over it, at least he still reassures himself. Paul, let me tell you, that’s only the other side of G.A.S. 🙂
The other inspiration was Janine L. Thun from Hamburg. She has a beautiful daily photoblog, and in private conversation she asked me about the D300, considering buying one. I talked about my project to get a D700, and that way I arrived at my statement that, although high ISO is absolutely fine on the D300, ISO 6400 is not usable any more, and if at all, then only in B&W. She asked me for samples at 6400 and, well, here we are.
Reassurance? Click on any of the images. They all are JPEGs straight out of the camera. No Photoshop, no cropping, no nothing. I have set the camera to picture style “Monochrome” with a slight yellow tint applied, ISO 6400, and that was it.
It’s interesting what happens when you take ISO and noise out of the equation. Not that there is so much noise to begin with, at least at the sizes that I display here. It is a wholly new style of shooting, carefree.
There is something pleasant to the noise these new Nikon cameras produce. It began with the D200, and since then Nikon has perfected this film grain like look. I guess I will experiment with post-processing such images, because of course they may need some cropping, they may need a vignette applied, they may be material for any kind of my usual tricks, but what I have seen so far has made me feel very comfortable with my camera. Which may or may not preclude me from buying the D700 🙂
The Song of the Day is “Straight, No Chaser” from Thelonious Monk’s 1961 live album “Thelonious Monk in Italy”. See him perform eight years later on YouTube.