D800 -Review Part-1
Hello all, its been quite a while since my last blog. I have purchased the d800 since then and have spent some quality time with it. Man, first off I'd like to start off by saying this camera is not for everyone. First off if this is your first blog post of mine that your reading or have happened to stumble upon, I mostly shoot people/portrait photography. What does that mean as far as the d800 is concerned? A crap load of detail. Which is great if your a retoucher or love seeing every little flaw and pore in the skin of your subject. This took my by quite a surprise when using the camera for my first shoot. I was amazed at how far I could zoom in while in Lightroom and Photoshop and still see pure skin before hitting the pixel level grid, and even at the grid level in some instances I'm still able to make out skin. This is great when dabbling with dodging and burning when I pretend to be a professional retoucher. If you shoot landscapes or architectural photography I believe this camera is for you hands down. If your a run and gun type of portrait photographer this camera is probably not for you, but if your a self proclaimed n,a,s head like myself, you know that you probably really really, don't need this camera but you'll find an excuse to get it. I would suggest at this point looking into a used d3s, d700, or the new d600.
Down side
The downside so far has been the upside, which would be the extreme level of detail. Hey, looking back at my d700 there were times when I could get away with doing little to know retouching on a model, but the d800 will not work that way. In person, in front of me the model looked fabulous; however, the extreme amount of detail in the file proved to be my undoing. I believed we unmasked flaws and pores she didn't even know she had. This camera if you so dare to step up to the challenge will call upon you to up your post processing skills to take full advantage of the files and to make your clients happy. I plan on doing some d700 to d800 comparisons as time and subjects allow to show some visual representation of what I'm discussing. But at this point one shoot is not enough to give anything more than a general opinion on the camera. I will need to do a lot more work and report back to you guys/gals.
Disk Space
This section will be short and sweet. on my first shoot out I was happy as a pig in a blanket to finally have a dual card camera, coming from the single slot d700. However, that quickly changed when I filled up my 8gb sd card(setup to capture jpegs) and only had a gig left on on 8gb cf-card ( setup to shoot raw). I believe I had almost 14 gigs after the shoot altogether. My gig is a terabyte but averaging that much a shoot would surely send me to the poor house, or at least have me appear on an episode of storage disk hoarders. So you will most definitely want to slow down when shooting and chose carefully the images you take and plan on keeping.
Vertical Grip
After much debate about spending an obscene amount of money on a grip, I went with a third party option. So far the grip seems ok. (Flash Point D12 Magnesium Grip ) The grip can be purchased from the link above. I am in no way associated with Adorama, just thought posting the link could be helpful. So, the grip actually feels great. Like I've heard others say besides the softness of I believe the af button or the back focus button and the clickly sound of the main and sub command dials I really don't notice much of a difference between this grip and my nikon-made d700 grip.
Well, that's it for now But I hope to drop updates in the coming months on my photo shoots and adventures with this camera. So please like always whatever camera you shoot please keep on shooting and learning. I'll leave off with a few pics that I've captured so far.
