The other day, fellow - Nikonian, Rick Hulbert and I pooled our cameras, our lenses and our teleconverters, and over the course of five and a half hours -- yes, five and a half hours -- we configured a staggering number of combinations.

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Rick and I were helped by two other professional photographers and one stunning model. The shoot was done in the Vancouver Photo Workshops studio with a concrete floor. Major kudos to Marc Koegel for his participation.

http://www.vancouverphotoworkshops.com

Our set-up consisted of mounting the camera bodies and lenses on a Gitzo 5 series carbon-fiber tripod fitted with a Wimberley Version II gimbal head. The tripod was weighted with sandbags, its position marked, and it was positioned exactly sixty feet (we measured) from the model's position, which was also marked.

Every camera we used, a D3, a D3s, and D3x was set to neutral, and we triggered each shot with the mirror up and cable release with a one-second delay. We took two shots in raw with every combination. Every shot was done at 200 ISO, at f/11, and the sync speed of the camera. We used a single high speed 16 GB card for every camera.

We used four different teleconverters, the Nikon 1.4, 1.7 and the latest two versions of the 2.0.

The lenses tested were Version I and Version II of the 70-200mm VR f/2.8 (all TC's tested at 200mm), the 200mm f/2 VR, the 300mm f/2.8 VR, the 200-400mm f/4 VR (TC's tested at 200, 300 and 400), the 400mm f/2.8 VR, the 500mm f/4 VR and the 600mm f/4 VR.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, to the right is our lovely model, Marissa from another photo shoot.

Take me to the tests!

More notes about the test & our recommended Nikon links

Watch the video!