I got a call this afternoon from a shop in Mong Kok.  They received one Nikon D800 today and they were holding it for me.  Normal price.  Of course I got it.

Not much time to really play with it right now but from the little I’ve done so far I can tell you two things – the high ISO performance is amazing and getting tack sharp images is freaking difficult.  I got home, charged up the battery, ate dinner and went up on the rooftop.  I only snapped off a couple of test shots and then it started raining so that was that.  This is with the 70-200mm f2.8 VR II lens, VR switched off, 200mm, ISO 800, f2.8, 1 second.

The only thing done to this photo was to load the RAW file into Lightroom and then export it out to a JPG.

First off, auto-focus simply couldn’t lock in on the image – I have no idea how far away this tower is from me but I’m sure it’s at least a mile.  I had to switch to manual focus.  If I had more time, I was going to try the shot stopped down to f8 or so but as I said, the rain.  Here’s a crop:

It’s kind of okay-ish but ever-so-slightly off.  Okay, I know, I’m shooting all the way at the tele end, aperture wide open.  I’m guessing if I backed off a bit on the zoom and stopped down a bit that I’d get sharper results.

Here’s a couple of takes on the same image after playing around a tiny bit in Lightroom.  If I was more awake, I’d probably have more patience to finesse this properly.  (Or maybe I wouldn’t be posting this stuff at all!)

Now here’s a shot of my dog Bogey.

This time it’s the 24-70mm lens at 70mm,  f2.8, 1/30th of a second.  Why 70mm?  Because he was sleeping and I didn’t want to get too close and risk waking him up.  Why f2.8?  Because I’m tired and fully automatic mode was easier and since this was handheld, I didn’t want to drop below the 1/30th of a second mark.  The shot is completely unprocessed except for loading the RAW file into Lightroom and exporting as a JPG.  (BTW, in case you haven’t read it elsewhere, the RAW file was 49 meg.)

Oh, btw, the ISO on the above shot?  Lightroom tells me it’s 8063 ISO.

Here’s a crop, you can see he’s got an eye problem that will be taken care of soon.

And you can see, the sharpness isn’t quite there.

The next two days at work are going to be long and exhausting so I don’t know how much time I’ll have to learn the camera before the weekend but I think you can guess what I’ll be doing on Saturday and Sunday.