j_m41

<p>Thanks, Matthew! I looked all over Google and strangely couldn't find a picture of the bottom of a D700.<br>

Now, what happens if the tag was removed? Any other methodology? </p>

<p>Alright. So I have to make this as short and nonspecific as I can.</p>

<p>My local authorities are attempting to retrieve my D700 which was "taken without permission" recently. Subsequently, I located it on a local buy/sell website. The authorities are attempting to put their hands on the camera.</p>

<p>If they are successful, they need to be able to find the serial no of the body quickly to cross-reference it with my record. This has to be done at the moment of the transaction. So, here's my questions:<br /> <br /> 1. Is there a label at the bottom of the camera body with the SN. (I just can't remember, lol. Never paid much attention to that kind of details.)<br /> <br /> 2. Is there a way to retrieve the SN No from inside the camera menu?<br /> <br /> Since this has to be done on the fly, we don't have the luxury of taking a photo and pulling the EXIF data. Sorry I am being cryptic, but the less detail I share at this point, the better. Thank you for your help!</p>

<p>To Scott and Christopher: Thank you for your suggestions. In fact, that is the technique I will use from now on. </p>

<p>Sorry, <strong>Michael</strong>. My bad. I confused LENR with High ISO NR. Yes, LENR will certainly make a positive difference. However, as <strong>Joe </strong>points out, it will effectively double my exposure time. That's OK by me--I don't really do a lot of long-exposure photography--so I'll give that a try next time I'm out. I will also try taking a series of 30s shots and combine them. That should help reduce some of the artifacts. Thank you all for your help.</p>

<p>Michael, no I didn't. I shoot almost exclusively in RAW, and it's my understanding that LENR only works in JPG. No?<br>

Jos, thank you for the link. I wasn't aware that Lightroom could map out hot pixels. I'll give that a try and report back. </p>

<p>Well, I went out last night and took some long exposure shots of the sky. I do mostly street and documentary photography, so this is was a new experience. When I came home and looked at the pics, I was shocked to see nasty hot pixels all over the place. (Please see the image in the link below. Look among the trees and around the house.)<br>

Image Link: https://app.box.com/s/646ys5dd8tvf0eni0pud58f1bowi8hy6<br>

<br /> Now, to be fair, my D700 has seen better days. It's clocking at almost 200K clicks, and I can sense that it's tired and is ready to give it a rest. Still, I was wondering if anyone knew if there was a convenient way for me to deal with the hot pixels for the time being, until I have completed the long-deserved upgrade.<br>

I mean, are there software and/or tricks I can use? Thank you in advance for your help.</p>

<p>Hi Stuart,<br>

Of course! I would never ever consider selling anything used without a complete disclosure. In any event, I am inclined to make the repairs, and keep the camera. For one thing, I believe that it is the best DSLR that Nikon has produced so far. It is not surprising that D700 has cult following.<br>

JM</p>

<p>Thanks you all for your wonderful responses. I do love my D700. Even with the newer Nikon DSLRs in the market, I am still convinced the my D700 is the best all-round camera for me- I am a Documentary and Street photographer.<br>

Regarding the questions about shutter actuation count from Nathan, Shun, Jose, et.al- I neglected to mention it in my original post. Are you guys sitting down?<br>

It's got....171K click on it, mostly in rough environments- tropical heat, humidity, dusty, in monsoon rain...you name it. LOL.</p>

<p>I have owned my D700 for about five years now, and it's gotten a lot of use in that time. I just sent it in to APS for cleaning and maintenance. They're recommending that I have the following things done:</p>

<ul>

<li><strong>Replace the Mirror Box Sequence Unit</strong>. Apparently, the gears that move the shutter are pretty worn. This maybe the reason why the shutter mechanism freezes up in extremely cold weather, something I started experiencing a year ago.</li>

</ul>

<ul>

<li><strong>Clean the inside of the Pentaprism</strong>. There's quite a bit of dust and debris that's gotten in there. This is obviously not an essential repair, but given that the camera will be disassembled for the replacement of the Mirror Box it's cost-effective.</li>

</ul>

<ul>

<li><strong>Replace the left-side (rubber) grip</strong>, which is starting to peel off near the Focus Selector Switch.</li>

</ul>

<ul>

<li><strong>Regular cleaning, including the sensor.</strong></li>

</ul>

<p>The total bill comes to $645.<br /> the D700 has been my only camera up to now, but that's about to change. I am considering purchasing another body, either a D750 or Fujifilm X-T1. I might just end up selling the D700. For now, though, I am going to keep it around as a second body. <br /> So, what I am wondering is if it's worth spending all that money in getting the D700 in top shape. Is this a good investment, regardless if I keep it or sell it down the road?<br /> Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!</p>

<p>Thank you, gentlemen. Your input have been invaluable. In the end, the buyer and I agreed that I would make the print and ship it to a friend of his Stateside who would then hand-carry it to Argentina on his next trip. But, once all the costs were added, the print was simply out of his price range. It was a rather large print (60 inches on the long side) so you can imagine how expensive it all became.</p>

<p>I just received an inquiry from a potential customer (from Buenos Aires) who saw a photo of mine on NatGeo. He wants to buy it, print it out on a large scale and hang it on his living room wall. He wants to print it locally to minimize cost. Of course, this means I have to share my high-res digital file with him, or his printer. My question is, how do I maintain copyright, and ensure that only a single print is made, for the purpose pf my customer's personal use. Never been in this sort of situation so I am clueless.</p>

<p>I have a couple of odds and ends questions regarding the D700:</p>

<p>1. I have Sandisk 16GB Extreme III CF card that I'm using with my D700. I do all my shooting in NEF 14-bit and save in Lossless Compressed. The counter on my camera read 620 with a fully formatted card. Yet, when I am shooting, I can stoot easily up to 999 shots. What is going on? Has anyone seen this before?</p>

<p>2. All my 14-bit RAW files come out to 13.5-14.2 MB in size. Once again, this is Lossles Compressed. Yet, Thom Hogan is saying that 14-bit NEF Lossless Compressed should be around 16.4 MB. I don't know what's going on here. I have doubled-chekced my camera setting to be sure that the bit depth and compression are properly set.</p>

<p>Thank you all. I came to the same conclusion; i.e., it's really useless to compress a drive. And like you guys pointed out, 1TB drives are so cheap nowadays.</p>

<p>I have an amateurish question: does saving a RAW/NEF file on a windows compressed drive compress the file? I just installed a new drive on my system. I am planning to save the NEF files (lossless compressed) from my D700 on it. I am also planning to activate File and Folder Compression on the drive. But worried about possibly compressing the NEF files in the process and loosing data.</p>

Thank you all for your feedback. The tips I acquired from here will be invaluable for me. I have the camera set to sRGB on the belief (mistaken?) that then the preview on the LCD would be very different from what I'm seeing with my own eyes. Of course, as Joe pointed out, using the camera LCD to make critical decisions is foolhardy. In the end, I really need to get my monitor calibrated.

I have shot over 30,000 photos with my D300 since April. I shoot mostly in RAW, with white balance set to the

specific weather condition; hardly use AWB. I normally set my Picture Control to modified STANDARD, with

sharpness at 5, and +1 saturation. Since I shoot RAW, those setting are where I start in CaptureNX, and do

adjustments as needed, but in general I don't really veer too much from the camera settings. After shooting all

those pictures, I an becoming increasingly unsure of the D300 white balance settings. I am also not sure if I'm

doing the right thing by shooting with a cranked up Picture Control setting. So, I decided to do a comparison.

 

 

<p>I don't have a color chart, but I found a colorful floor mat, with lots of reds, greens, blues, a little bit of

gray, and even some purple :-) Yesterday, on a slightly cloudy day, I shot a series of JPG Fine sRGB photos on

the porch, under the shade. I turned these photos into a comparison table, and made a PDF (<a

href="http://www.box.net/shared/bmrhq3521d" >NokonD300 White Balance Comparison.pdf</a>). Would be great if you

guys take a look at the file

and give me some feedback.</p>

 

 

<p>I don't have a calibrated monitor, but based on the camera LCD on default brightness I can sum up my conclusions

as such:</p>

 

<p><u>On White Balance</u>:</p>

 

<p>1. AWB produces a blue tint on JPEG

<br>2. Cloudy and Shade WB settings produce tones that are too warm (something that I have noticed for a long time,

and the thing that got me questioning the D300 WB settings accuracy in the first place.)

<br>3. The 5560K WB setting seemed to produce the most correct tone under the lighting condition.</p>

 

<p><u>On Picture Control (WB=5560K)</u></p>

 

<p>1. D2XMODE3 seemed to produce the most accurate colors.</p>

 

<p>Thanks for your help.</p>

 

<p>P.S. DXMODE in the file should read D2XMODE. I didn't catch the error till after I uploaded the file. I have a

very

slow and unreliable connection :-( so I decided to let the typo pass.</p>

I have shot over 30,000 pics since April with my D300, mostly in RAW. I read somewhere early on that it was better to use specific WB settings, i.e., Direct Sunlight, Cloudy, etc., rather than AWB. That is what I have been doing. I also generally use the Standard Picture Control, with Sharpness at 5 and Saturation to +1. Wonder what you guys think of these settings. BTW, it seems to me that the default Cloudy (as well as Shade) WB settings give too warm a tone to the picture. Any thoughts?

I recently purchased the D300, along with the 16-85 VR and the 70-300 VR lenses.

I also had a couple of Nikkor lenses left over from the film days. one of them

being the AF-D 70-210 f/4-5.6. After reading a few things about how good the

70-210 AF-D lens is, I decided to carry out a quick comparison. Here I posted

two identical images, shot in identical conditions, one using the 70-210 and the

other with the 70-300 VR.

 

AF-D 70-210 : http://img59.imageshack.us/my.php?image=nik5048erx6.jpg

 

AF-S 70-300 VR: http://img142.imageshack.us/my.php?image=nik5049emd9.jpg

 

Now, I didn't expect the 70-210 to be as good as the 70-300 VR, but what

surprises me is the huge difference in the quality of the two images. You see a

(very) noticeable lack of sharpness in the 70-210, in comparison to the 70-300

VR. There is also a large amount of chromatic aberration. I would have expected

the two lenses to be closer in performance.

 

Would be very interested to hear from anybody with experience with either, or

both lenses.