This is an exciting time for NIkon shooters. After what seems like an endless stream of new and innovative technology from Nikon's rivals in the camera business, the faithful have been rewarded with a bevy of impressive products that has turned heads and made us pause to think how the new stuff may be used in our work-flow.

For years on end, Nikon's road-map has been a mystery. This is especially frustrating in today's digital world where technology advances so quickly and obsolescence is so common. Frustration is an understatement when trying to deciper the direction your camera company is going just when trying to decide whether to fish or cut bait to either save a few dollars by staying with Nikon or fund the expense of jumping ship to keep on the bleeding edge of techology. Digital photography is a fairly new field and Nikon lead the pack by producing the first truely affordable equipment with the introduction of the D1. They didin't rest on their laurels and soon followed with the now classic D1h and D1x. Togther, they set the standard for all professional digital camera bodies. As amazing as these products were, technology was on the move and never static. Nikon with its impressive Nikon D1 series cameras and its faithful watched the legions leave to Canon as they introduced faster cameras with more mega-pixels. Nikon was bleeding when their professional cameras appeared to be stagnant with Canon's ever improving their line-up.

Nikon seemed to come back with much fanfare--mostly related to folks just eager to see anything from Nikon get released--with the D2h. Though the hipe was incredible and the camera undeservably did not match expectation--image quality was in question. Whether accurate or not, the doomsayers were drumming the demise of Nikon with what appeared to them an half hearted attempt by Nikon to keep up by releasing a less than perfect D2h. Without getting into the merits of these arguments/statements let's just say the perception that Nikon was failing was there regardless of the real capabilities of the camera. The Nikon faithful began to really wonder if the company was up to the task of meeting the Canon challenge.

To much great fanfare last week Nikon introduced the D2x with an incredible set of spec's. The most curious of which is a crop mode that allows the shooter to change from a full-framed 12.4mp imager to a 6.8mp cropped imager. This is the first truely innovative technology offered in the digital camera world and it's inciting all kinds of yeas and nays concerning merits. Let me say, I'm psych'd

Since the original frustrating issue with waiting for Nikon to release new comperable technology to compete with the other guys was understanding which direction Nikon was going as a digital camera company, this one capability--the crop mode--tells reams about what they're trying to do. What follows are some of my own theories of why Nikon is going the direction it's going and how this may be used in my workflow.

First as a nature/sports photographer, the biggest most important feature any camera system should provide is great long lens abilities. This means photographing things at great distances to bring them close for easy viewing. In film days this meant buying incredibly expensive long lenses and a great set of matched teleconverters. Even then, this didn't mean you got the picture. Sometimes the complexity and size of the long lens and camera were too great to allow the photographer to shoot what he wanted He was stuck schlepping around this stuff which was always heavy and rountinely sent the most stout of us to the doctor. If you didn't know, heavy equipment always limits anyone's ability to shoot interesting things. Further the focal length of these lenses was sometimes limiting. A 600mm lens with 2x tele-converter was many times too short when shooting with film. Enter the Nikon D1h with it's 1.5x crop factor. Instantaneously this meant your lens' focal lengths were extended by 1.5 when the camera was introduced. Of course, nothing optically was actually being done by this camera to your lenses but effectively if you didn't mind the qualtity/number of the pixels on the imager, your 600mm lens just became 900mm. This simple fact isn't lost on any nature or sports photographer. Now add your converters and you've got quite the lens setup. I know there's a wide-angle problem with croped imagers like Nikon's but I'm talking about nature/sports photograpthers here and usually they aren't too concerned with the wider side of their system.

Now, add the Nikon D2x with its 2x crop mode and your 600mm becomes 1200mm. While this is really impressive, to me the super tele-photo focal length extension isn't the real benefit of this crop. The ability to use smaller faster lenses and still get the same pictures is what's exciting to me.

Last year I shot at the Vince Shutte Nature Preserve to photograph black bears. It was a very intimate location with black bears in close proximity to each other and to you. With little effort, I used a 300mm f/2.8 to get frame filling images of their bodies. Even then, there's a limit. I shot perhaps 25% of my images with TC-20e which combined with the 300mm f/2.8 AF-S is less then perfect but impressive enough never the less to get head shots of the bears. Still, I wasn't close enough. Add other problems like overcast skies I knew the image quality of my camera was severely degraded at ISO's above 400. Even better, I wished I could've used 200 ISO.