D600 or D7100 for Wildlife & Motor Sports

bland

I shot my D800 and D7000 last year for both racing and wildlife, and both did well.

That said, I would get the D7100 for racing and besure and get a fast card like Adamz stated.

I would also get the D7100 for wildlife because you need every bit of reach and the DX format will give that to you.

Also, the 70-300 Nikkor lens is awesome for both venues when shooting in daylight and it's under $600.

jackdavisphotoman

My Ferrari is really fast, but boy I just can't afford the high octane gas, so I put the cheap stuff in :-)

Thats great and so true, thanks i"m LOL

MikeFrewer

Thanks Ironheart, that was great !
So after taking all of your advice into consideration. I will be waiting for the D7100 to appear , and buy that with the kit lens (for general daily use). I will also get the Nikkor 70-300 f/4.5-5.6 to go with it. Many thanks to everyone for all of your great help, humour and advice

Mike

Msmoto

@ Ironheart

Ferrari....LOL...actually you can save a lot money by just not doing the $5,000 service when required.... )

donaldejose

I know a guy who is now driving his third Ferrari. He says you have to allocate about $20,000 a year for insurance and routine maintenance. I once dreamed about getting an older 360 when the price fell to around $70,000 but I hear the 30,000 mile routine maintenance service is $6,000. Just too much waste of money. I will never have one. An old Porsche 911 is much more realistic and contains plenty of performance ability.

SkintBrit

If I want to shoot motorsports, seriously...this means the ability to capture a biker coming off the high side, one must have 8-10 FPS to compete with all the other folks out there. Neither of these will do this. A used D300s will give you at least one more at full res...

However, if I had no camera, thus no lenses, I would very seriously be looking at the other manufacturers out there. The multiple issues with the latest bodies, customer service concerns, I might go see what the talk is on some of the other forums and learn...and, I have been shooting Nikon for nearly 50 years.

Unfortunately for many of us who are invested into one brand, we actually do not know all the issues of the other side. So, a lot of investigation would be in order. But, those gray lenses we see are not there by accident. Mmmm, maybe they have two or three bodies for a reason...like a spare tire... )

If I was starting out in photography with no equipment and needed a high FPS camera for shooting action, I'd seriously look at one of Sony's SLT's. Most give double digit frame rates, and can focus at the same time. Unfortunately for me the trade off with generally poor (Sony) glass and high ISO abilities would still give me pause for thought.

Godless

Cars. Sports. Speedboats.Yawn.

Wake me up when you are done with the boring stuff.

SkintBrit

Cars. Sports. Speedboats.Yawn.

Wake me up when you are done with the boring stuff.

LOL! Try this Godless.........I need a camera to take the first nude portrait on the surface of Mars?

Msmoto

We can shoot motorsports for fun or as a profession upon which we depend for the money to live. I have in the past, done my shots and then they play on a TV on the side of my RV during the event. Also, all are available for download free from Flickr. This is why some are real junk (wheels stopped) because I am given requests for a static photo ...(some people like these better than blurry backgrounds.)

In any case, as I might have a competitive streak, my intentions are to produce photos as if they were "camera ready art" and can be reproduced in any form. And, of course, I want to have better shots than most of the pros...Unfortunately, at most venues, one must have credentials to access the best positions for seeing the track. The price of credentials goes up with the importance of the event.

To play with the "Big dogs" requires the same equipment...

Oh, cars, sports, Speedboats....Yawn....love it. Godless, we should have met when I was riding my Hayabusa...

DaveyJ

I would take the D7100 over the D600 for these uses. I don't have the one I ordered yet. The D600 on the other hand needs revision to fix engineering corner cutting.

PB_PM

And how do you know the D7100 doesn't suffer from the same issues? It's not even shipping yet!

obajoba

Having just gone through this dilemma I will offer up a few of the issues I had with my D7000 shooting prep football, wake surfing, swimming, etc.
- The buffer depth will crush your hopes and dreams when you review your photos after the event, 6-7fps is more than enough, and even 4fps would be fine if you had a buffer depth of 20-30 frames, but 10 RAW frames is nothing in the realm of sports shooting
- high ISO matters, and even though ISO6400 sounds great, I am willing to bet the D7100 doesn't perform all that well above ISO1600 for prints larger than 8x10. Be sure to consider your final medium when choosing the camera
- the AF system on the D7100, if it truly uses the D4's AF system, will annihilate the D600's AF system. For sports, this truly matters
- SANDisk Extreme SD cards are plenty fast enough for a D7000, so I would guess those (or anything faster) will be plenty fast for the D7100. Remember, in most scenarios the bottleneck is the buffer write speed, not the SD card

These things led me to an unregrettable, albeit slightly irrational, decision to buy a D4. If a D400 had existed I can almost certainly guarantee I would have a 300/f4 and a D400 instead of a D4 and a 70-200. Also, Scott Kelby shot an NFL game with a D600 and he wasn't *completely* disappointed (see link below.) Any way, that's my $.02.

http://scottkelby.com/2012/my-first-nfl-shoot-with-the-nikon-d600-and-some-other-new-gear/

Godless

Instead of just machine-gunning everything at max FPS like the rich people do, wouldn´t it be cool to learn the art of timing your shots/bursts right? I don´t get the people who complain about the buffer size problem. Just wait a second or two if the buffer fills and you´re good to go again. There will be plenty of opportunities, and no matter what the gear you will sometimes fail. Just relax, or does your life depend on getting the shot just there and then? Life is too good if your biggest problem is a too small pen.., sorry, buffer.

MikeFrewer

The reason for buying the D7100 with the "kit" lens is so that I can use it for everyday photography. The 70-300 I will use when I visit the Le Mans 24 hours later this year, hopefully I will also visit some other race tracks in Germany like Hockenheim and the famous Nurburgring. Just down the road there is a super nature reserve with some camouflage towers with benches inside for photographers and bird watchers to sit and wait for the wildlife to pop their heads out of the undergrowth. A friend of mine is trying to get me to go full frame because he has bought the Canon 5D mk2. But I just want an upgrade from my D40 that will suit my needs. Maybe later when the D400 is announced I'll buy that and pass the D7100 to my 13 year old son who is showing a great interest in photography with his D3000. Who knows, maybe later I may buy an FX camera to compliment the D400.

obajoba

Instead of just machine-gunning everything at max FPS like the rich people do, wouldn´t it be cool to learn the art of timing your shots/bursts right?

In a perfect world, where your contacts never get cloudy, your AF system is always spot on, the weather is cooperating, and your reaction time is less than .01 seconds... sure. Even with the machine gun approach there is a lot of skill involved, yet fauxtographers still occasionally rear their ugly heads with "the amazing capture" that is a somewhat sharp, heavily cropped, fairly well timed frame of the 10 they took in those 2 seconds. There are few people that can truly pull this off and in the film days they were pro's and a very very few amateurs. One of the reasons we now see so many amazing sports photos is because of technology+skill. FWIW, I had better results at 4fps with my D7000...

I would also add that saying this is, IMHO, equivalent to saying no professional photographer should use Auto ISO; I've seen many that do and it's because it allows them to focus on other aspects of the shoot when they know the camera is going to handle a portion of it for them (that's part of the reason they spend $6k on a body) yet their photos are still leaps and bounds above those from a hobbyist doing the same exact thing. Isn't this one of photography's oldest arguments?

Msmoto

I shot a season this past summer...10,000 plus shots...waiting and waiting for the "moment" never came....Probably 30-40 hours of shooting time...so, when it happens in some sports venues, we want to be on top of it.

And, this is just the way it is...unless one has credentials...

adamz

tommie - it's always about the moment, the whole photography is only to capture the moment the way it is (reportage style) or the way You want it to be (artists).

I have to dissagree that fps doesn't make a difference. it does though it's not the only one factor that makes a sucessful story. in wildlife photography (and most likely on sports photography too) the factor that is the most important is anticipation. no matter how fast Your AF gonna be it's never gonna be fast enough for flying birds, running foxes, etc. everything else doesn't matter as much.

as for d7100, guys please read and understand the specifications. it doesn't have d4 af system. it has d300s AF hardware with d4 alghoritms. it's a HUGE difference.

obajoba

it doesn't have d4 af system. it has d300s AF hardware with d4 alghoritms. it's a HUGE difference.

Didn't realize it was D300s AF Hardware, I assumed it was "new" and running the D4 algorithms (which according to some are not so great.) Quite interesting...

PB_PM

Instead of just machine-gunning everything at max FPS like the rich people do, wouldn´t it be cool to learn the art of timing your shots/bursts right? I don´t get the people who complain about the buffer size problem. Just wait a second or two if the buffer fills and you´re good to go again. There will be plenty of opportunities, and no matter what the gear you will sometimes fail. Just relax, or does your life depend on getting the shot just there and then? Life is too good if your biggest problem is a too small pen.., sorry, buffer.

It really depends on the subject matter. You have to remember that not everyone is an a amateur/hobby shooter. In some cases, getting the shot makes the difference between getting paid or not.

Secondly, there is a big difference between machine gunning, which is useless if your timing is off. For example, about a month ago I was shooting beside at D800 user who was firing at will, at full 4FPS. He was just holding the button down till the buffer filled. I had the D300 (14bit mode, thus limited to 2.5FPS), in single shot mode, pressing the button as the action happened. I was still shooting very quickly, close to the max 2.5FPS. Based on what I saw of the results my images where better, even though I had slower FPS, and an "inferior" camera from a technical standpoint. BTW we where using the same lens, so all that separated us was skill and the camera.

Skill is a big part of it, no doubt about it. At the same time, I'd still rather shoot at faster speeds. In sports, and some other shooting, life is too short to miss the the shot. If you miss and the other guy gets the shot, guess who gets paid? I'd rather have 10-20 perfect shots firing at 6-8FPS, than miss because my buffer filled after 6. See where I'm coming from?

obajoba

PB_PM nailed it.

My quick example: shooting a football game, receiver catches a pass - I have 6FPS (10 deep) - I fire off almost filling the buffer, and the receiver gets nailed, half a second later I fire again which fills the buffer, receiver fumbles. Guess what? My buffer's full and still writing... By the time I can shoot any sort of burst with the subject in focus, a guy on the other team has picked up the ball and is 5 yards down the field.

Now, you might say that timing would have prevented this, but timing at 2fps also means the likelihood of me getting the ball as it hits the receiver's fingertips is less than 1/10th of a second. I know for a fact that my reaction time is not that great. So, because I have crap reaction times (due to a nervous system issue) I prefer 6-8fps with the ability to hit 20-30 total frames in 6-8 seconds. Remember, the buffer is a bottleneck even when you're not "machine-gunning" because several short bursts can crush it just as easily... and this is more frustrating to me than anything.

Godless

Well, there is the D4, and you can get used D3S (not to mention D3 and D700) quite cheap.

I know the buffer filling can be frustrating, but there are workarounds like the fastest cards possible. And getting your timing right will help (it´s a topic almost never discussed, that´s why I brought it up in the first place)

For some ppl these things work, and for the others there are the big bricks, D3/D4 etc.

Horses for courses. Pay for what you need and go shoot.

And relax, don´t stress too much or your heart will fail. Life is not that serious anyway or is it?

heartyfisher

PB_PM nailed it.

My quick example: shooting a football game, receiver catches a pass - I have 6FPS (10 deep) - I fire off almost filling the buffer, and the receiver gets nailed, half a second later I fire again which fills the buffer, receiver fumbles. Guess what? My buffer's full and still writing... By the time I can shoot any sort of burst with the subject in focus, a guy on the other team has picked up the ball and is 5 yards down the field.

Now, you might say that timing would have prevented this, but timing at 2fps also means the likelihood of me getting the ball as it hits the receiver's fingertips is less than 1/10th of a second. I know for a fact that my reaction time is not that great. So, because I have crap reaction times (due to a nervous system issue) I prefer 6-8fps with the ability to hit 20-30 total frames in 6-8 seconds. Remember, the buffer is a bottleneck even when you're not "machine-gunning" because several short bursts can crush it just as easily... and this is more frustrating to me than anything.

If you do want to shoot sports the way you described, Can I suggest that there may be an alternative.. If you shoot using "JPG Fine" the buffer goes to about 30 frames.. sure you wont have the RAW files but I think from the way you described the scenario that that may be worth the compromise.

PB_PM

Well, there is the D4, and you can get used D3S (not to mention D3 and D700) quite cheap.

I know the buffer filling can be frustrating, but there are workarounds like the fastest cards possible. And getting your timing right will help (it´s a topic almost never discussed, that´s why I brought it up in the first place)

For some ppl these things work, and for the others there are the big bricks, D3/D4 etc.

Horses for courses. Pay for what you need and go shoot.

And relax, don´t stress too much or your heart will fail...

Not everyone has the budget for a D4, or even used D3s, regardless of whether they get paid for their work or not. Just a fact of life. In fact I have a D700, but again it isn't always the best camera in every situation. If it was, I wouldn't still have a D300 or want a D400.

BTW who's stressed out? I'm not. It's Nikon that is loosing sales by not making a camera I'd buy. I'm not loosing any sleep over it.

Msmoto

@ adamz

Very important point...anticipation...In shooting the cars, bikes, etc., I follow the vehicle, shoot a burst of maybe half a second about the time I think the inside wheel is up, or when the inside knee is down. Usually three or four exposures, which will cover 50 feet of travel in a slow corner.

My bird experience...at what we call the Outer Banks in North Carolina, found me shooting a burst of again three-five shots as the bird flew into the frame as I was panning. This was with 800mm (400mm TC2) and I got a few I liked...here is one..
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fantinesfotos/7646638140/sizes/o/in/set-72157630700786770/

I am not certain if the D600 or the D7100 will work as well as the D4...

bland

I'm not a fps shooter for two reasons, one the auto focus freezes with the first shot and secondly the buffer issue because it shuts you down for more immediate shots.

Both my D7000's have a hair trigger so I can fire off as need be. I'm not saying the fps function shouldn't be used, it's just not for me and I've tried it many times.