i'm under quite bright conditions with light shining from the top.
you'll see the way the light actually travels over the car.
Now I've taken a shot of this and there's a really nice close shot that i can take. showing all these lines, and the shapes.
including the wheel
Look at the exposure difference, between the bright area and the dark wheel.
Now this can cause a problem, now what the D7000's got
well as some of the other nikon range
is something called active D-lighting,
Now this is all to do with contrast, and ranges in contrast.
So what it does, is it allows
clever computer, er programming as it were
is it takes the shadow areas and adds more detail in, but what it also does is it
notices the highlights in the frame too
and thinks hang on a minute we need some more detail in there.
Now this isn't a magic wand moment,
it's quite subtle generally anyway.
let's have a look and see how it copes with this lighting shall we.
So I've already set the camera up on the tripod, we're doing an up-right shot so that
i can get the wheel and the body work itself.
i'm using a midrange aperture.
uh... i'm using a low iso two, a second long exposure, so that's quite long
So there's a chance for all that hard light to burn in.
Now on this shot, i've
turned the fifteen lighting off, so let's just take a quick shot, i'm using the self timer as well.
For three seconds.
That's already all pre-focused.
hit the shutter,
as you can hear, that was a second long.
Now it has on the back of the camera is,.. Jane if you want to swing around here for me
when i bring that picture up, you can see the highlights on the back of the camera
flashing.
Now, what i'm going to do, is if i go into the menu system
active D-lighting
To save time, i'm just going to go higher just to show
you the difference.
So that's set to extra high, i haven't changed any settings on the camera
It's already pre-focused so i'm going to fire that of again.
and this time look at the level of
shadowing highlight the detail, it's been able to produce
and soften the effects of the highlights and lift those shadows of it a bit.
Dramatic increase in the picture-taking ability.
Now why would you want this?
for example you're going out and shooting a landscape, you've got a darker
foreground
some leaves or a valley or something but you've got a really bright sky, now what this would is it would
reach out and help the exposures so you get some detail in the sky and
yet you don't get muddy washed out kind of browns and greens.
It's a very unique feature.
And it's across the range too.
Let's move onto the next thing.
okay
another very intelligent feature about the seven thousand
is the fact it's got twin
esti card slots
what that allows you to do is have a main
card that you can actually record everything onto.
you can use the second card slot, which is just underneath here
you can save J-pegs to one and tiffs to the other.
or you can actually you can just say i want stills to one and video to the other.
It's a very very clever system, but what it does do is it give's you extra capacity.
To be able to shoot for longer, particularly if you're shooting video on top, because
it's only got a four gig card.
Now that will be used up very very quickly with lot's of things.
okay
now one of the problems that we all have
found out when using video or live view with the auto-focus system is,
it's a contrast detection and the D7000 has two or three versions that
you can actually use.
They're not very fast, they're not very quick. We need to get round this to
actually shoot the camera onto something that has quite,
definite lines, and it helps it actually focus. Now in this picture
here for example i'm going to use this big Mercedes badge on this car.
Let me show you how i set that up.
I've got live view up and if i,
pull the focusing box down,
there we go, i can use that badge if i focus that.
that's reasonably quick, so i can take the shot.
Now one very clever thing that this camera has is it will
actually do a face detection, from up to ten faces in the frame.
So if you have somebody in the frame, and you're taking pictures of groups
It will automatically do it.
and as you can see when mike moves around the frame
it will recognize that he has got a face as you can see
and it's all automatic.
Now as you could see there the focus couldn't really keep up with the movement
but essentially that's uh...
one of the limitations at the minute.
Now to sum up the D7000
i'm going to start with the bad sides because let's be honest there's not many of them
It's a thousand-pound plus camera, so that makes it quite expensive for anybody.
Particularly in this financial climate.
But is it worth it?
Well for me the cons really do
put away any sort of negatives.
This machine was customized to be used, abused really.
Yes it's got the weather seals, it's got part magnesium body,
uh... and you can use it in
perhaps tough conditions but nothing like the pro-sort of damage and the sort of use a
pro would throw at it.
but this thing is built to be fine tuned, it was built for
the best image quality possible.
it's fast at six frames a second, it's got an incredible iso range.
The image quality from this camera
at a hundred iso, is absolutely
incredible.
particularly with the high iso, there's no need for introduction for the high iso.
Er, twenty five thousand
six hundred
yeah the images have definitely got grain and you can see that, but
it's still pretty impressive kit.
So with the accessories, with the kit you can actually add to this camera
and for the price,
it really does make a decent lens on it by the way, because the senor on it
is very, very particular.
But if you put cheap glass on it, i think you'll end up disappointed, and you'll actually see the problem with the lenses.
So with that in mind, with the weight, the size, the price
the fact that it's going to be used for practically any thing
from fast sports through to quality landscapes
with decent primes or fast
zoom's themselves, it's a very confident camera. I think it's a bit of a giant
killer.
it would, you could argue that it's a D300S. Mm,
i think this probably outperforms it in a good few ways,
and that really only leaves the full frame camera can really top it. So,
certainly in terms of the Nikon range, if you're looking at a camera and you want to
be allowed to create your own creativity
that expands your photography, and actually go to the next level, the D7000 actually
really does take a lot of beating.
Even from competitors like the seventy which is a little bit more expensive still, particulary
with the high iso
ability of the camera itself.
From my point of view, it's a highly recommended camera.
I'd give it easy an eighteen and a half out of twenty.