D800 @ 3200iso

[Greg McCary]

Well I guess I am going to have to keep it as I got the D800 nice and muddy on the river bank this morning as I got caught in a late rain. I guess I can start making payments. LOL
The good stuff so far. The high ISO shots are amazing, the buttons are laid out nice and it's easy to work with in the field. The build quality in great as it looks like it can take a beating in the field. The dynamic range is as good as I have ever used.
The bad. I am sort of let down with the AF system. Maybe I just don't have it set right but the 17-35mm and 85mm 1.8 hunts even in some what good light. I have all the focusing point on, I guess. It's like the lenses go past proper focus and then brings the focus back, My former E5 and current E-M5 focused much faster than what I am seeing with the D800.
I also will blow the highlights out in the sky very easily if I don't take care. Plus I need a grip as the battery life goes quick. I want to really get a feel for everything before I write a review. Being new to Nikon I could easily be missing something. The menu seems endless and complicated. It may take awhile for me to master that. But the pictures it takes are amazingly good and to me that's the bottom line.


4 Way Lunch, Cartersville Ga. by Cosmonaut's, on Flickr

[Frog]

wow........

[ELS]

Hi Greg:

Very nice, thanks for sharing...

Have a nice day,

Ed
.

[Franglais]

Welcome to D800 photography. You already had a Sony FF DSLR so it shouldn't be too different.

GMcC> The high ISO shots are amazing
Fr> Sorry but.. I'm surprised at the amount of noise in the sky. My pictures yesterday at 5000 ISO in the church were cleaner. Are you shooting RAW or JPG? I'm shooting RAW with conversion in Lightroom

GMcC> I am sort of let down with the AF system. Maybe I just don't have it set right but the 17-35mm and 85mm 1.8 hunts even in some what good light. I have all the focusing point on, I guess. It's like the lenses go past proper focus and then brings the focus back,
Fr> I gave up using closest-focussing mode when I realised that it was rarely focussing on exactly the right spot and that bothered me. Nowadays I usually select just one focussing spot

GMcC> Plus I need a grip as the battery life goes quick.
Fr> I get about 800 pictures out of one battery charge, and I always have a spare battery with me. I think that the grip is very expensive plus it makes the camera bigger than I want. I would only get the grip if I was shooting action with big lenses but that's not what the D800 is designed for

[AgingEyes]

Many have reported focus problem with their D800. You can read Thom's posts on D800 and Nikon here:

2012 Nikon News and Comments by Thom Hogan

Scroll down to find articles from Aug 20 2012 and before.

With a D800, you need good glasses. To some, even the 24-70 f2.8 VR is just OK but really not good enough for the D800. But, it depends on how you use the photos IMO.

I don't have a D800 or a D800E, but I got the above from reading other people's experiences, people who scrutinize and test their cameras and lenses in depth.

[Franglais]

If I see anybody talking about a D800 autofocus problems on another site I just click on the "Ignore this person" button. (Thom Hogan talks a lot of sense, however). I've wasted time looking for left field autofocus issues and I haven't found any. For me the difficulties are elsewhere.

If you look closely at D800 images - as you tend to do with Lightroom and the 100% zoom - you realise that a lot of shots that looked in-focus with lesser cameras aren't really in-focus, the real depth-of-field is less than what I thought, camera shake has ruined the overall sharpness etc.

To get perfect results you have to use the best lenses and a tripod and be very careful. However this gives me a level of detail which is completely invisible in the largest print I can make (A3). I still try to get perfect definition for images that I might one day sell via a picture library. For other things it doesn't matter too much.

My best lens on the D800 is the latest 60mm macro. I have the original Trinity lenses (Greg's 17-35 f2.8, 28-70 f2.8, 80-200 f2.8). They aren't as good as the 60mm but I would use them for picture library pictures. For lesser things I'm happy with the 70-300VR and the latest 24-85VR.

The 24-70VR that you mention doesn't exist (yet). You mean the 24-70 f2.8. Never tried it but it's supposed to be better than my 28-70.

BTW my comment about my 5000 ISO image: I remember that it was overexposed and I had to reduce the exposure (darken the image) by about a stop. That might have given me a less noisy image.

Here's a 6400 ISO image that I did while testing the 24-85VR yesterday

[armando_m]

Greg,
LOL, you got caught in the rain so now you HAVE to keep the camera , ... good for you

I use single Af point , I get fast accurate AF , no hunting , even the sigma 150 macro , which used to be unusable regarding AF in the D300 is fairly fast and accurate with the D800

Which 85mm f1.8 did you get, the AFS version ?

FYI, Plenty of the D7000 tips from Grandpaw apply to the D800

I tried the 24-70 f2.8, it is great, but huge, heavy and expensive

[Greg McCary]

Thank all for the advise. It did seem to perform just a little better tonight. Charles I think I shot this RAW by mistake. I'll get it sooner or later.

[Franglais]

Thank all for the advise. It did seem to perform just a little better tonight. Charles I think I shot this RAW by mistake. I'll get it sooner or later.

You can do amazing things with the RAW coming out of the D800. For your overexposed skies problem you can expose so that you don't blow the skies - which makes the rest of the picture dark - then bring up the rest of the picture so it looks normal. You can do this with any camera shooting RAW but with the D800 you can go further. If you're shooting JPG this is the Active DLighting function.

My 28-70 f2.8 is just as huge and heavy as the 24-70 that Armando mentions. I got tired of people saying to me "That is the biggest lens I have ever seen"..