D800 Diary - Day 3

I didn't manage to do as much with my D800 today as I was out in the garden enjoying playing football with my kids and generally loving the Spring sunshine.  Us Brits love to talk about the weather and at the moment we are having a great spell of blue sky and warm weather for March.  Being a landscape photographer though, I don"t want blue sky as it doesn't really lend itself to dramatic light and I still haven"t managed to get any landscapes that are worthy of uploading.  What I did do was a few studio photos with my very (un) willing kids.  Why anybody goes into portrait photography I will never know! The results are simply amazing- the detail in the image and the tonal range is breathtaking.  The series of images below give some idea of this.  What I was struck with was the colour in the images and the sharpness of the RAW images.

Emily - ISO 50 - Nikon 70 - 200mm (crop of main image below)

The colour image of Emily below is a large crop of the original image - again showing the crop potential of the D800.  I know I have gone on about it - but it is so useful to be able to do this.

Emily - ISO 50 - Nikon 70-200mm Lens (sorry about the 2 catchlights for the portrait pros out there!)

After using the D800 for 3 days now here are the main highlights and a few lowlights.

• The resolution is amazing - it is so useful to have this resolution
• Editing the images in Aperture isn"t a problem - I have not experienced any speed issues as people were worried about. I am using 2.8Ghz iMac with 12GB of RAM.
• The focusing is quick and accurate.  The focusing modes available in the D800 are really useful.  The image of Thomas below was taken with face priority AD on - it worked very well and of the 20 images I took only 2 were not spot on.
• The ergonomics are good - the front AF and Fn (Function) buttons really work well and allow you to quickly change settings when you need to
• The movie mode produces amazing 1080 HD movies and the focusing is very quick.  However it is difficult to produce a movie with moving subjects - I have tried to take movies of people running and it was difficult to keep them in focus.
• Having 2 memory cards has proved useful for a number of reasons.  I have set all movies to record to the SD card and used the CF card for photos.  The other main reason having 2 cards slots is great though is that I aways forget to put a card back in the camera - this way there is less chance of doing that!  In terms of the cards and write speeds - I have a SanDisk 32GB SDHC Extreme Pro 95MB/S card (from Amazon) and a SanDisk CF 16GB Extreme Pro 90 MB/s card (from Amazon).  I have seen no difference in performance between the SD and CF cards - so if you are only going to buy one go for the cheaper SD card.
• The DX crop mode is useful if you want to have a faster frame rate or want to save space.  I haven"t really used it after the 1st day though and don"t think I will use it much going forward.
• My DX lenses are useless in FX mode (as expected)  See below for the performance of the 17-55mm Lens in FX mode.
• The battery life is good - I think I will be averaging around 1200 images per charge with lots of viewing of the screen.
• The time lapse function will be useful and the fact it makes a movie is great.
• The exposure is good - however I have been under exposing my shots by -0.3EV as it has tended to burn out some highlights.  I prefer that it exposes to the right though and for most of my work I will manually expose photos.  The image below shows how good it is with people - here it didn"t under expose Thomas"s face.
• The rear screen is exceptional
• The viewfinder is exceptional

Here is an image I took whilst messing with the AF focus modes on the D800 - this was with face priority AF - it worked amazingly well - even at a strange angle like this.

Thomas - ISO 1600 - Sigma 50mm @ f/1.4