Holy High ISO Batman!

The last couple of days have been really busy with finalizing some albums and meeting with new couples. We also shared a Valentine's Day dinner with a few friends. Marc and Colleen, from the Wedding Festivals, treated us to a fabulous dinner at their beautiful home, which just happens to be the Gassaway Mansion. Mike and Tammy, from Unforgettable Wedding Video, were also there and since Marc and Mike are photography lovers, we took our new D3 along to show them.

Now that we've finally had a chance to really play with the D3, all we can say is WOW! We knew it was going to be a big step up from our D200s, but we had no idea how big of a step. There are so many great features and improvements that we could go on forever, but for now we'll just show a high ISO comparison. All of these images are straight out of camera using each camera's auto white balance and with just a little sharpening for the web.

Here are a couple quick shots of Ruby, our mascot, in very low light.

D200 ISO 3200

D3 ISO 3200

And here are the same images cropped to 100%. To really show the differences, we cropped on the shadow side so the high ISO noise would be even more apparent. For those who don't know, noise is similar to film grain in digital cameras and too much can introduce nasty color artifacts.

D200 ISO 3200
100% crop

D3 ISO 3200
100% crop

Here's a grab shot of our friend Mike at the Valentine's dinner. This was shot as ISO 6400, which our D200s couldn't even do. The D3 actually goes up to ISO 25,600. Talk about INSANE!

D3 ISO 6400

D3 ISO 6400
100% crop

As you can see there is a tremendous difference in the image quality at these high ISOs. Of course, with our D200s we rarely went beyond 800 or 1000 and used flash to supplement the light if possible. This means with the new D3s we won't be tied down to our flashes nearly as much and will be able to capture beautiful ambient light (or lack there of). This will be great for the candlelight ceremonies we have coming up this year!

We can't wait to try out the D3 at our engagement shoots coming up and will be posting more images soon.


Curtis & Emily
Kismet Photography