I've got a horrible cold at the moment, but my days of misery have been punctuated by news of two glorious events. Yesterday there was news of my niece Titi's birth, and today there was an email from Katz Eye Optics that they now have a model available for the D700. Woohoo! I couldn't type fast enough to order one.

I've long complained about the stock focus screen on the D700, particularly in conjunction with low-light photography.

Since getting a Katz Eye for my D200, I've found it to be indispensable. I got so used to it that the first [...]
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After getting my Nikon D700 and putting its low-light capabilities to the test (see: "Impossible Photography: No Light, No Tripod, No Hope. D700 and a 50mm f/1.2" and "A Few More D700 f/1.2 Night Shots") I quickly expanded my understanding of the lighting conditions in which I could do handheld photography. In exploring this new territory, I often pushed too far and ended up with poor results, but surprisingly often I got results that would have been considered impossible just a couple of years ago, such as Anthony blowing out birthday candles, or riding his bike at dusk, or doing [...]

Almost two years ago I created and released my autofocus test chart, for testing the autofocus accuracy of a camera/lens combination. Accompanied by a detailed discussion about how to test autofocus, and of issues that might crop up, it has garnered a lot of attention. My daily logs tell me that it's still one of my most popular posts.

About a year ago, I was contacted by Michael Tapes of Michael Tapes Design (makers of the popular WhiBal white-balance reference card). They were working on a device to allow much more accurate/repeatable testing than my chart allowed, and he wanted [...]

My "Nikon D3 Shutter Release in Super Slow Motion" post from two weeks ago, in which I offered a nice presentation of the ingenious work by Marianne Oelund, garnered quite a lot of attention, quickly becoming the most popular post on my blog (which perhaps doesn't say much, but in any case, it's still – two weeks later – getting many thousands of views a day).

A lot of people have commented that they had no idea that a camera shutter was so complex, and for the most part, that's okay because, for the most part, photographers really don't need [...]
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(The white line on the left side of the blue "exposure" band, below the big "@", is when the camera's flash fired for the exposure.)

Marianne Oelund recently posted a sequence of images of a Nikon D3 shutter in action, over on the Digital Photography Review Nikon D3 forum. With her permission, I have turned that sequence into a mini web movie application, such that you can animate the frames by sliding your mouse back and forth across the image.

I thought she had created the images with a high-speed camera, but it turns out that, lacking a high-speed camera, [...]