Fortunately the eyepiece size on the D800 is the same as it was on the D700, which means I can use my DK-17M magnifying eyepiece on the D800 and that does seem to help a little.

Another exceptionally long day at work.  And once again, tonight it’s raining.  My rooftop does have a minimally covered area but the mountains around my house are shrouded in fog tonight.  So I just set up this quicky little thing.  This time I think I’ve done everything right.

• 24-70mm F2.8 lens at 52mm
• F5.6 aperture
• UV filter removed

Working from the light of a single ceiling fixture, I couldn’t get the white balance quite right and decided to stick with auto – actually the tone should be a tad colder but I’m leaving it as is.  Sticking with single point center focus, the focus point on these is the blue floral pattern just to the left of and behind the boy’s head.  All I’ve done is to load the RAW files into Lightroom and then export them to JPEG at a resolution of 1024 x 1024 and at 248 pixels per inch.  I didn’t touch any slider bars or make any adjustments to the image. And now, here’s the results:

ISO 100

ISO 200

ISO 400

ISO 800

ISO 1600

ISO 3200

ISO 6400

ISO 8063

ISO 10159

ISO 12800

ISO 25600

In my book, this is pretty amazing.  To my tired old eyes, even at 25,600 the results are still usable (at least for the web).  Here’s crops of several of the above shots:

At ISO 100 of course the image is clean.

At ISO 800 still very nice.

Let’s get more extreme.  ISO 3200 – some noise evident but still quite reasonable.

And now, all the way out to ISO 25,600:

Okay, not the miracles one presumably gets with the D4.  But if I’m shooting handheld some place seriously dark, I could conceivably go this far.

This weekend will be spent practicing shooting, working on what it takes to get tack sharp images at wider apertures.

Actually, Friday, I think I’ll bring this to work and see what I can get in the neighborhood at lunch time.