D800 Diary - Day 2
First of all - thanks to all the people that viewed and commented on my day 1 diary. A lot of the photos I post in this blog have higher resolution images in Flickr (Some are full resolution) - I have created a D800 gallery in Flickr >>
Today I have had chance to take a look at the auto focus performance as I photographed my son"s football match. In the D800 you can set various dynamic area AF modes (9-point, 21-point and 51-point). I set it to 21-point dynamic auto-focus during the whole of the match and the results were amazing. Almost all my photos were perfectly in focus using the 70-200mm Nikon VR I lens. What is really good is when you are in DX mode (which I used for half the match to get 5fps) the tracking points fill a larger part of the final image.
Saturday Under 8s - ISO 500 - Nikon 70-200 VR I @ 200mm F/3.5 1/8000s
Most of the shots I ended up using for the game where shot in FX mode as I found that the DX mode meant I accidently cropped parts of the images I wanted. I could sacrifice the 1FPS for the extra area this gave me to play with. The image below shows the amazing resolving power of the D800. Click it to open the full resolution image in Flickr.
The main benefit of the camera I am finding is the versitility. The resolution means that you can shoot and have the ability to crop later. The photo below again shows this.
Crop of FX image on Nikon D800 taken with Nikon 70-200mm @ 190mm F/3.5 1/6000s
The detail in the image above is amazing - here is a further crop at 100%. You have to remember that I am at F/3.5 here - so not all ball is in focus.
I also played with the HD video during the match - it is obvious though that this will need some practice. The auto-focus in live view is quick but on moving subjects you need to have a lot of skill.
Early that morning my son had spotted some canadian geese that had landed in the field about 100m from our house. So I put on the 100-300mm Sigma and took the shot below at ISO 1600 and heavily cropped to get this image.
Canadian Goose - ISO 1600 - Nikon D800 with Sigma 100-300mm lens at 300mm f/4 1/4000s (In DX mode)
One things that I have been emailed about by many people is the performance the Nikon 17-55mm F2.8G\AF-S DX IF-ED lens lens and Tokina ATX 116 PRO DX AF11-16mm F/2.8 that I currently use for most of my landscape photography. I haven"t used then too much yet as I haven"t had the time to go on a morning landscape shoot. But I can show you some of the results I have got from various trials in DX and FX mode. The results aren"t great and it is clear I will have to swap these lenses for new FX landscape lenses.
This is the Tokina 11-16mm lens at 11mm. You have to go down to 15mm before you see no black vignetting - however the corners are unusable. I did some test and for the Tokina you have to use the 1.5x DX crop mode to get good results.
Heavy Vignetting on Tokina 11-16mm wide angle lens at 11mm
Daffs - ISO 50 - Nikon D800 with Tokina 11-16mm Lens f/5 1/400s DX mode
The corners on the DX crop are still soft (actually slightly softer than on my D200!) - but the central detail is very good.
Daffs - ISO 50 - Nikon D800 with Tokina 11-16mm Lens f/5 1/400s DX mode (Central crop)
Finally as the sun set rather than going out and taking landscape photos I decided to take a time lapse movie with the D800. One thing that is great about this is that it produces a 1080P full HD time lapse automatically. The results are amazing. However - one word of caution - the video speeds up at the end as the longer exposures kicked in and the 15s interval was less than the exposure.
For the full 1080P HD version click here >>
Tomorrow I am going to test the D800 out with some studio shots.