Creative Choices Highlight the D5100

We’re not in the habit of leading off our Marketplace columns by quoting a new camera’s marketing slogan, but in this case nothing works as well. No matter how you look at it, the story of the 16.2-megapixel, DX-format, incredibly versatile D5100 is “creativity from any point of view.”

Part of that creative potential is immediately evident: the three-inch Vari-Angle super-high resolution 921,000-dot LCD monitor swings out from the body, then rotates to make self-portraits and pictures from most any angle you can think of easy and fun.

The rest of the story is the Special Effects mode, a feature that’ll personalize your stills and movie clips (the D5100 offers 1080p Full HD video with full-time AF and stereo sound).

The coolest of the effects might just be Selective Color. Simply sample one color in the scene and take the picture. The color you sampled will appear in color while everything else in the picture will be monochromatic. So walk up to that blue lamp, take a reading, back up and shoot the room; the lamp will be its true blue, all else will be monochrome. If there are several sources of the same blue—or red or green or whatever color you sampled—they will appear in color as well. Think of yellow cabs on a city street or red file folders in an office or a pile of plastic-coated paper clips, with only the green ones in color.

There’s also the Miniature effect, in which selective focus and image compression turn any scene into the model-railroad station look of a miniature world. Or choose Color Sketch to create color outlines of your subject for a posterized, graphic look to your pictures. Or High Key and Low Key, in which the former creates a fashion photo look, the latter a dark, film noir appearance. Night Vision effect sets the camera for black-and-white and high ISO to create a nightscope look to the scene.

And then there’s HDR effect. While HDR—high dynamic range—photography is most often accomplished when you shoot a series of exposures with a tripod mounted camera and then process the images at your computer with one of a number of imaging programs to capture the range of tones in a high-contrast scene, the D5100 will accomplish the effect in a different way. A single press of the shutter results in consecutive shots under and over the ideal exposure; then the camera’s built-in software combines the images to create the HDR photograph. And you can choose the amount of smoothing—low, normal or high—to control the degree of the graphic effect. It’s all done in-camera, automatically.

Any time you want a visual reminder of the results of the special effects programs—or when you hand off the camera to someone less experienced than you—the D5100 features sample photos of each of the effects.

With a full complement of Nikon advanced features and technology, the D5100 is a compact, lightweight, go anywhere camera that’ll inspire new ideas and creative approaches to image making. And while it’s way beyond starter status, it also offers totally automatic operation when you want it.

We usually tell you that the best way to appreciate a new Nikon D-SLR is to check it out at your local photo dealer, but in the case of the D5100 “check it out” really isn’t the right phrase. We’d suggest you head on down to your dealer and enjoy some creative play.