D7100

shutterdancer

So,let me raise my hand as another satisfied D7100 purchaser.I've spent several days now acclimating and unlearning ingrained muscle memory acquired from shooting the D90 for so long.

DaveyJ

I tested my D7100 Nikon versus the D300 last night with photos of the nearly full moon in the mountains. The moon was clear and luminous and the whole scene was cold. The D300 recorded the scene faithfully and quickly with a -3.5 meter bias using the 70-300VR Nikkor. I then quickly detached the lens and put it on the D7100. Nothing could make the moon shot properly with the D7100. I concluded that with this camera, the crop setting is useless. I finally, after a long drawn out process got a couple of photos using the DX regular mode. First real issue is the plus minus setting. There is NOT enough minus adjustment for proper dark (almost black) sky) and the moon of proper intensity. Even a minus 5.0 the moon is too bright and only post process could "save" the image. My guess is the engineering was so slanted towards micro adjustments at the day light side the amount of minus left for this kind of photograph was simply not there. Again, the crop factor setting was totally useless for this kind of photograph. I was NOT impressed. Before Nikon releases a camera it should be set up better than this.

Ironheart

What mode were you in? Was auto ISO on by mistake? Do you have the images so we can see exif data?

Gjesdal

Handheld, crop mode
Quite pleased with the result (I come from D5100)

Golf007sd

@DaveyJ: Shooting the moon requires proper technique…and I'm not sure if you went through the processes quite right. Try these tips and then come back to us and let us know how it all went.

My moon shooting technique:
1) A tripod is a much…period
2) Need a 200mm or larger focal length lens (TC are welcomed)….you will be cropping the image.
3) Remove any UV you may have on your lens.
4) Use a single AF (Center AF)
5) Shoot in Manual Mode
6) Use f/7.0 /w ISO setting of 100-400
7) Under Expose by 2 stop.

DaveyJ

@Golf007sd: Actually I have shot moons for years. The use of a tripod is even questionable in that at 640 ISO and the "sunny 16" rule for a full moon in clear skies with no light pollution, the results should be almost automatic. My full moon cropped shots usually look like gjesdal"s image on the D300 and the same lens. I fiddled for one and a half hours and changed quite a few settings. Under exposing by only two stops never works. I do not have Flicker or any other on line photo sending settings. I assume gsedal's pic was taken recently with the D7100 in crop mode? I will shoot this again but initially the results were quite dismal. Also due to the much faster and accurate results of the D300 with the same lens.

heartyfisher

@DaveyJ : I am not sure what you mean with the issues you describe.. an image with full exif would be the best way for us to help get to the bottom of this.. otherwise its a bit pointless discussing it :-) .. maybe if you copy and paste the full exif data we may be able to see something .. but with out an image I am not sure what the exact problem is ?

Ironheart

Flickr is free

DaveyJ

Internet service where I live does not permit sending images. High speed Internet where I live would cost about 20K to install. So I hike down and get on for a few minutes and send no images. I also did not get to test any modified techniques as the sky was very overcast and it rained fairly hard all night long. Daylight shots are normal. The issue here though is that ISO and program settings with D300 do not cut it with D7100. I have taken the same type of photos and video on the D7000 (same exact lens) and that was pretty much normal results (properly exposed and detailed. The mods I will try are more to the type Golf007sd suggested. I know Fiickr and Face Book accounts are free but I do not, and never have used them due to the lack of high sppeed Internet. Ironically high speed Internet is available out along the road where my property starts.

heartyfisher

LOL build a little access point by the road and plug in your laptop when you need access :-) :-)

how far is it from the road to your house.. you may be able to set up some directional wifi to get from the road to your house :-)

donaldejose

DaveyJ: Your reports are very strange. Makes me think something is wrong with your particular sample of D7100 or some setting is set wrong. There should be no reason the same manual settings on a D300 don't produce a sharp properly exposed image on a D7100. ISO has not changed since the time of the D300 so the same exposure settings should produce the same image and sharpness should be greater with the D7100. Something is seriously wrong.

Ironheart

@DaveyJ, I too live in a rural area, I have been in your position. Depending on where you are you may have more options that you think. High-speed wireless and IDSL come to mind, but there are others. If you want, you can PM for a further discussion. Just for grins, have you done a factory reset on your D7100 as perhaps one of the settings is causing the behavior you describe? Also if you could just dump the EXIF data (text only) someone might spot something...

DaveyJ

@donalddejose: I have NOT shot my D7100 on manual yet. I will be shooting it next moonlight attempt on manual and about 400ISO? The technique I use in shooting moonlight on the D300 HAS been leave in Program and shoot at 640 ISO and the images are crystal clear. Again usually at 3.7 minus setting. I live in an area where no other human lights show at ALL. To say the least: isolated. That was my goal. To live in that setting. The first 22 years we had no electric power from the grid. Still unless I put in a dish, I have no even mild speed Internet. So Ironheart knows what I am talking about.

Trust me, I am NOT complaining. My GUESS is that my D7100 camera is OK, but my D300 technique will NOT work at all. Every night after the bad episode it has been TOTALLY overcast until last night and I went out last night several times and there was no moon anywhere I could see. We still have hard crusted snow so when the moon is out it will be quite bright. Even with no moon the starlight coming off the snow was bright enough to photgraph in.

So I am going to say to donalddejose sure something is NOT set right. I too am used to not using even a tripod as the Slik I have was quite trashed back in the days when I would on occasion put even an 8X10 camera on it when I was too lazy to take out the Berlin Grand Master. Now I use the Berlin Grand Master as a surveying instrument tripod and actually rarely use a tripod. But my grandson's Manifrotto is available. I just need a quick shoe that fits the tripod to the D7100. I will let you know if the results are what I anticipate (and hope for!). It just seems remarkable to me that several generations later the D7100 would be so much fussier about technique. Also that the plus minus setting on the D7100 cannot handle the range the D300 could?

DaveyJ

I still don't know if GJesdal's full moon was taken on the D7100 crop mode. I assume it was?? Again I am using my 70-300VR lens which when cropped on the D300 gives excellent clarity and other quality aspects. I am looking forward to seeing what the crop mode on the D7100 will do with the 70-300VR and SOMEDAY the 80-400VR!

donaldejose

It is surprising that your D300 technique won't work with the D7100. I would have thought it would. Hopefully, manual will work. Also, try A and S modes, with appropriate minus exposure compensation, if manual works. Perhaps Nikon's Program has changed between the D300 and the D7100? Perhaps Matrix metering is causing an issue? Try spot metering on the moon? Try many different combinations of things to see which work and which don't. But they all should be just different ways to get the camera to select the same settings so if some of them don't work, it could be a flaw in your particular camera.

spraynpray

I don't see what the fuss is all about - shoot it at ISO 100 using delayed exposure or MUP as bright as you can without getting the blinkies and using the sharpest aperture for the lens you have then darken in post as necessary. Takes less time than posting about it!

BrainBeat

One tip when taking the moon I remember being told or reading ( I forget which) is to make sure you are tacking the moon very fast. My this I mean you want be to using a minimum of 1/500th of a second as the mood is both very bright and is actually moving fairly fast. So I would use shutter priority at 1/500th or faster too and see if that makes a difference.

I have taken a few photos of the moon myself and would agree that the camera does seem to meter incorrectly and tends to be too bright (in the moons case by over 1 stop). I have however been finding this does seem to be happening with many of my shots being a bit over exposed even in good light.

Msmoto

Someone should start a Shoot the Moon thread...

heartyfisher

Someone should start a Shoot the Moon thread...

I think we did have one in the old forum :-)

found some ..
http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=1903
http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=3390

TaoTeJared

Moon? Did someone say moon?
D800 - Tokina 300mm f2.8 w/ 2x teleconverter (Kenko) @ f/8, 1/80th, ISO 100



I added a Moon thread as well.
http://forum.nikonrumors.com/discussion/856/the-moon#Item_1

TaoTeJared

@DaveyJ - Have you compared the AF performance with the D300? (sorry if I missed it on a previous page)
Interestingly I have read a couple of things that the meter gets tricked a bit more on the D7100.
I haven't read anything about errors yet - that's a good sign.

Look forward to everyone's experience!

BrainBeat

Hi guys I have come across a very strange bug with my D7100 which happened yesterday. The bug happened while I was shooting off a bust of photos of some girls playing soccer. All of the usual things that you would expect to happen when taking a photo(s) happened except it seems when it came to writing/displaying these images to the screen. It seems for some reason instead of my camera recording these images to the SD card it seems to have not recorded a thing but for the playback of the images is showed some photos I had taken the previous day in a sequence on the screen as of they had been taken in the burst. Thankfully it was not my camera deleting these older images (which i feared at the time as they had not been saved yet) and it was just not recoding these images. I changed cards immediately and kept shooting fine after then.

I hope this is a once off thing but I am considering reporting it to Nikon (if I can work out where to do so) as it is not really a bug you would want to happened all to often or at all really. I hope the rest of you who also own this camera can look out for this issue too but that it does not happen to you.

DaveyJ

Since my major problem with moon photography, comparing the D300 to my D7100 the moon has not shown itself at all. So I wait for the full moon, at almost the end of April. TaoTeJared's shot of the moon is wonderfl and makes the Tokina lens look great.

BrainBeat

I decided to report the issue mentioned above to Nikon and after asking me for some more information as to the cards I was using and the settings I had on the camera they felt it was likely that I was using a non tested/approved memory card. While I would think it is not impossible that it could have been that I had successfully done plenty of other small burst before it without issue. I guess it will have to be something I will have to keep an eye on but as I for work at least have not done much sports photography this way it may never come up again.

spraynpray

Interesting Brainbeat. So are you going to continue with the same memory cards or have you changed them?