Since street photography is what I'm trying to focus on lately, I naturally thought about the V1 (with viewfinder, the J1 is not even worth considering in my opinion) as a platform for street shooting. So if I were building an ideal (real-world) street kit, what would I choose?
- Customization - The Ricoh GRD III is an almost perfect example of a camera being customizable. Almost every button could be re-mapped and you could store all settings into custom memory banks. Perfect - the jury is still out on the new Nikon so I won't say anything more here.
- Hyperfocal setting - an ideal street camera would be very easy to enable/disable hyperfocal shooting. Again, the Ricoh was nearly perfect for this - Snap Focus was a breeze to setup, you could configure the hyperfocal distance, and it's small sensor naturally gave plenty of DOF to work with. So the sensor size on the Nikon 1 isn't necessarily a bad thing here. Pair the 1 with the 10mm f/2.8 (27mm FX equivalent) and you've got a recipe for lots of DOF. The final test will come with the Nikon software and menu systems and whether they make this easy to setup and use.
- Size & weight - for me, this seems to be one of the absolutely essential aspects of street photography. You simply must pair your gear down to the absolute minimum. the Nikon 1 is the smallest interchangeable lens camera with integrated EVF. I suspect that you'll eventually be able to take 2-3 small primes and probably carry less weight than if you were packing a rangefinder with lenses. (And my dream kit with a 2.7x crop factor? How about an 7mm [~19mm], 13mm [35mm], and 35mm [~90mm]? Sounds delicious.
- Oh and what about the F-adapter? The 90mm equivalent described about would be filled in perfectly by the already released 35mm f/1.8 G - a spectacular lens in its own right. The 50/1.8G would be about 130mm, an ideal portrait length. The mind starts to shudder.
- Fast Autofocus - along with hyperfocal settings, fast AF is a must. From what I've read, on paper the Nikon 1 just blows away the competition - 135 single points, 41 area with phase and contrast detect modes. This should be comparable to most DSLRs.
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