D2x image quality and resolution amaze me.....

I posted this image in the macro/flower forum, but I thought folks here might be interested too. I was walking around a park with the 300/4 on my D2x looking for birds. I walked past some lovely flowers and I backed off enough to acquire focus and used the lens like a near-macro. There were bees in one of the images, so I made a huge crop to produce the image below. The image uses only 1MP of the D2x's 12+MP sensor. To me this is good proof that it's not just the number of pixels that counts, but also the quality. Any reactions or comments?

Gordon

 

Agreed. I happen to like fairly high contrast in most of my images, so for me that's OK. The light in this case was excellent - bright sunshine from the right direction.

Gordon

 

Hey Bill (or Jim or whatever your name is :lol: ) -

I'll make an 8x10 and report back. My guess is that it will look pretty good from 3-4 feet but not so good up real close.

I've had good success tracking large birds even at a good distance.

I've had lousy success trying to get sharp images of small birds (terns) at long distance with a 200-400VR plus TC-17, but I don't think that's a fair test. Im my case operator error would overwhelm any camera problems. I can tell you that the camera/lens combo seemed to be tracking OK, but I couldn't track myself well enough to keep the bird in the focus spot. At this stage in my learning process that just isn't possible, so I wouldn't hold it against the camera.

Finally, with even a fairly large bird that is tracking fine against a background of sky or water and then flies in front of a highly textured background like trees or weeds, focus tends to snap to the background. However when this happened I wasn't using single spot focusing, but rather the second setting up where focus can shift to any of the five central spots. Sorry, but Nikon nomenclature on this is beyond me. I'm not sure this would have happened using single spot focus as long as I kept the spot on the bird.

Stay tuned for print feedback -

Gordon