Advice needed? Wedding/camera upgrade ' asking on behalf of my girlfriend..

[Malthe]

First of all - thank you for looking and hopefully get your opinion or expert thoughts on the subject.

Okay the case is that Im asking on behalf of my girlfriend who is the photographer - Im mainly the second shooter / retoucher - with a graphic designer background. Im making websites for photographers and models - but also helps on set.

My girlfriend (the photographer) is mainly shooting portraits / fashion - but is planning to step into wedding photography.

The questions is that we are planning to upgrade to FX, it has been the plan from the start but right now when the Nikon D800 has come out
it makes it all that more appealing.
Mostly because of the added field of view - step up in quality and new ways of using current lenses.

So as noted its properly the Nikon D800 thats the should we buy it? But also for wedding photography would a less used D700 be an option? Some guessed that the iso performance would be better? But on the other hand its beaten by the video and mega pixels of the D800.

Also I wanted to know - the D800 can be adjusted in settings to 25 mega pixel, but then the camera becomes a dx camera ?

So what to use D700 or D800?


To tell what we currently use is a Nikon D7000 - which is great on the picture side but I think the FX capabilities would show. Also the
dx is kinda limited in wedding photography as far from what I have heard.. And I have never heard of any using DX in shooting weddings?

The lenses we own is :
Nikon AF-S 24-70mm f/2.8 G ED
Nikon 85mm f/1.4 G AF-S
And the standard kit lenses - which almost never gets used - except the 18-55 vr thats sharp and weight almost nothing.

We are also considering to buy the last lenses to have a complete set of the trinity or the perfect setup..

So the Nikon 70-200mm vrII is soon to be bought and then we are unsure about what wide-angle lens would be best for portraits and wedding shoots -
the expensive Nikon 14-24mm 2.8 - mostly loved of landscape photographers
or the Nikon 16-35mm vr f4 or Nikon 17-35mm 2.8.

Which one can you recommend and why?

And with that grade of lenses we own and the other two we will own thats good enough on the D800 right?

With the complete setup of these 4 lens does that eliminate the reason to buy primes?


In studio we are shooting with Elinchrom Bxri 500's and also on location with battery packs.. - but I'm guessing to wedding photography then we would have to get a sb700 or sb910? to each camera?
We don't have all the money in the world, we are only in the early twenties - so it would be great if you would have that in mind when adding what to buy - especially when helping with the wide-angle lenses - there is a huge price difference..

If you just could help me with just a little of this then I would have a lot of stress of my mind from my girl (; So thanks in advance!

And sorry if there is any misspelling or mashups - my excuse - I'm danish!

Regards Malthe

 

[djacobox372]

From what I can tell the D800 has a similar sensor to the D7000, only scaled up to full-frame. The pixel density is identical, which means the iso noise levels would likely be very similar to the D7000; however, the extra resolution helps reduce the softening effect of noise reduction so ultimately the low-light capabilities would likely be similar to the D700.

If you do a lot of tripod shooting then the D800 might be worth it, but if you shoot mostly handheld you may not be able to take advantage of all those extra pixels.

Another consideration is FPS, at a wedding you only get one chance for certain moments and the D800 is significantly slower (by 2fps) then the D700. This is also an added cost concern as the D800 will all but require a grip in order to get a decent shooting speed, and the grips for the D800 are going to be $$! A ungripped D700 shoots as fast as a gripped D800, and even faster if you add a grip and some AA batteries--not to mention the fact that cheap 3rd party grips can be found for the D700.

Basically I would rather shoot a D700 at a wedding then a D800, although, ideally both would be used. The D800 for staged tripod shots, and the D700 for handheld candid/ceremony shots.