I have been so excited to write our Nikon D750 review! If we’ve shot with you recently, you’ve heard us gushing about our new camera. We just upgraded this month to our first full frame camera. That might seem crazy to some but we’ve just never felt the need for it until now, and our trusty D300s’ have been amazing workhorses for us. We consider ourselves strobists, so when we need more light, we add it manually with reflectors, strobes or speed lights. The only time we ever really need to push our camera’s ISO is in a dark church which we just don’t shoot too many of. Well next year we actually have about 6 church weddings already, so this seemed like the perfect time to upgrade our gear, and the Nikon D750 just came out last month. This isn’t really an official camera review, but more just a few examples of us experimenting to see the sensor’s capabilities, which have really blown us away. We needed to have a shooting date to learn the new camera functions. You can find the exif data below each shot if you’re keeping track of the settings we used.

So where do a couple of photographers go on a Friday night to shoot lowlight portraits? First we started in North Straub park in downtown St. Pete, one of our favorite spots for warm golden hour light. Evan snapped this portrait of me which I just love while we were playing with some of the camera’s focal point options and tracking.

ISO 500  f/2.2 for 1/320s   shot on our 70-200mm at 85mm

An ISO of 400 or 500 is what we would typically use for daylight portraits but we wanted to see what the D750 could handle, so until the sun went down we found the darkest bar we could on Beach Drive. We could hardly see each other with the minimal candlelight in this place, but our camera could see light better than we can which I am still impressed by.

ISO 10,000  f/2.2 for 1/100s  at 50mm

10,000 ISO!!! These have just a tiny bit of noise reduction in Lightroon, but really it looks like there is light in this bar. We are shooting with pretty wide open apertures as well because I really wanted to test the sharpness. Besides the first shot where Evan is being lit a little by his phone, the beer and portraits of us are being lit by one tiny little candle on our table. Amazing. We had also started playing with the Wifi function on the camera so by this time Evan and I were getting so excited in the bar that people were starting to wonder so, since it was dark then, we took off to walk Beach Drive and take some night portraits with only ambient light.

ISO 8000  f/1.8 for 1/100s  at 50mm

Walking down the street we found the ambient light to be a little stronger than in the bar and got some beautiful portraits. SO crazy you guys, it was black outside and you can see me fine in this shot! Now here’s Evan on the steps on the Museum of Fine Arts, being lit by a fluorescent street lamp.

I would say this is the highest we successfully pushed the ISO while having an acceptable amount of grain. Again, this is barely edited, with just a little color correction and about a 10% grain reduction in Lightroom. So what does all this mean? Well it means no more stressing about too-packed timelines that have us shooting portraits past sunset or even into the darkness. More opportunity for some fun stylized night portraits when appropriate, maybe even a night engagement shoot in the near future. Our first session on the D750 was Kirstin & Evan who I also have to thank for treating us for this awesome night out on the town :) We shot their session hybrid between the D750 and D300s and our first full wedding on the D750 was just two weeks ago- and that was a wedding we had lighting challenges for so it was really perfect timing. I’ll be sharing those images and story here tomorrow!