I still don’t shoot weddings but…

 

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 …

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