Okay, now for the second part of where I started from for choosing a new camera--what type of equipment I currently use. I shoot extensively with the Nikon D1h. It was my first digital camera and its acquisition foretold the end of my film days. Many, many people questioned this purchase over the camera's brother, the D1x. Their issue was the image file size. While 2.74 mega pixels is pretty small from a consumer electronics perspective it did shoot twice as quickly as the D1x. Also, I knew the imager was outstanding and the 2.74 mp would easily meet the needs of my then printing system, an Epson 1280. A 13 inch wide printer, the largest print I was going to make was on the order of 10 inches which coincidentally fit perfectly with D1h files. Anything larger would be too much for the camera in my opinion. Oh, by the way a 10 inch tall D1h image was 15 inches wide which worked perfectly with 13x19 inch sheets of paper on an Epson 1280 style printer. So, I got the camera and have been happily shooting since.

The next step in getting a new camera is figuring out what was missing in my continuing maturing workflow. While the D1h was great, there was a severe problem with making large prints with such a small imager such as the one in the D1h while still maintaining image quality. Okay, the original nay sayers noted earlier did have a point. This issue became obvious when I bought my Epson 7600 wide-format printer. Stand alone D1h files were too small. Even when printed in landscape mode, 15 inch maximum image sizes were too small for this printer. What was a poor boy supposed to do? By pure coincidence, I discovered two things in close succession that contributed to solving this problem and promptly adjusted my workflow. The first was the realization making panoramic images was a snap in digital photography. The second was not only could I stitch images together to make panoramas, I could combine even more image files together to simulate huge digital image sensors. Realizing these was like finding an undiscoverd horizon to go towards with my style of photography.

For some reason, the typical 1.5x format--1 inch by 1.5 inch image size--most of digital photography inherited from the 35mm world just didn't appeal to me. Whenever I could, I'd crop my images to make long panoramas. In fact, it was the only type of cropping I allowed myself when shooting with the D1h. The file sizes were so small in the first place and I purposefully restricted myself from cropping on the short side of the image file to ensure the largest possible file. The idea here was the panoramic format was readily acceptable in photographic circles and only cropping on the long side allowed me to make panoramas while still keeping large files. I kept this in mind when out in the field shooting to adjust my compositions as required. Well, there's more than one way to make a panoramic. Not only can you just crop a single image file, with proper planning you can combine several image files together in Photoshop to make panoramas. In fact, this latter technique significantly increased the file size which effectively allowed me to print on larger sheets of paper. Using this technique with the D1h enabled me to make image files as tall as 15 inches--the long side of the D1h sensor--and as wide as I could want. Sure 15 inches was smaller than my printer's 20 inch capability, but the situation was totally acceptable with the idea sometime down the road I'd fill this void.

To further solidify my use of stitching images together as a digital photography technique, I began to make larger and larger images by not only making panoramas but also combining more layers to make effectively larger and larger image files. Combining four D1h 2.74 mp images was equivalent to an 8 mp camera. Okay, 8 mp is nothing in today's world of high mp cameras. And, shooting a single file was much easier than shooting four. Consider if I double the number of those images? How about triple? The possibilities were endless. Without too much more effort I was creating images in the realm of medium format digital backs costing upwards of $20K with my simple Nikon D1h. Now we're talking! There are lots of tools on the market designed to make this stitching process easy. I chose Realviz Stitcher. While an expensive program with its own set of interesting quirks, it does an excellent job making the stitching process easy and while producing outstanding results.

The other significant area I had little or no capability with my D1h was in the arena of long exposures. The camera and its technology was restricted to about 10 seconds of exposure before the image file degraded significantly. I thoroughly enjoyed shooting 30 second to 1 minute exposures to produce neat effects with color and motion when I used film. This all ended when I began digital photography 3.5 years ago. The D1h simply wasn't capable. Sure there are work arounds using Photoshop's blended layer mode to effectively simulate a single long exposure by combine several shorter image files. Unlike panoramas, I wasn't willing to manage the huge number files necessary to take advantage of this. I do have some standards after all and not everything can be fixed in Photoshop.

The last thing I needed or actually what I didn't want in a new camera was an increased burden on my digital darkroom. Despite what digital photography promoters may say, shooting digital files is not free. There's a cost. The larger the image file the larger the burden on your system. Either through longer processing and therefore faster computers or the need for more hard drive space to store all those massive files. Shooting larger images simply costs you more in your digital darkroom. This is probably the least tangible issue. It's very difficult to quantify how much a burden larger files really are. I decided to look at things from the macro point of view. Using the D2x as the sample, shooting 8 fps of 12mp images compared to the D2h at 4mp would use up hard drive space three times faster. Darn, opening images could take three times longer with a legacy computer thus causing frustration and forcing me to spend about $3,000 more bucks on a new CPU. Did I need all those mega pixels? Not really as noted before. I only needed enough to support a 20 inch wide print.