Nikon D810 – some follow-up thoughts

Juvenile marsh harriers at Elmley: deep crops from the D810/200-400 VRII. See text below. Click on the image to see it at full size.

Just a quick follow up to my previous post on the Nikon D810. I said that the look of the prints would be an important deciding factor. So, I got some 18” x 12” prints made (by Proam, who I think are excellent). Alongside the D810 images, I got some “control” D700 prints made from pictures of similar aircraft taken earlier this year.

The first print out of the pack was the Vulcan shot. It was one of those “Wow!” moments – it looks terrific. And the rest of the D810 shots looked terrific. Then I came to the D700 shots … err … they looked terrific as well. Actually, the differences in quality at that size print are pretty small. I showed them to Phil and asked him to guess which came from the 12MP camera, and which from the 36 MP camera. After a bit of humming and hahing, he got it right, and without any prompting from me.

So, yes, there are discernable differences between D700 and D810 pictures as 18” x 12” prints, but they are very slight. A bit more edge acutance, perhaps, but not much. Better tonality on a dull day, I think. Maybe if I got some bigger prints done, it would be clearer, but for normal pictures, normally framed and not excessively cropped, it is not a big deal.

In any case, that Vulcan picture was taken in portrait orientation as the aircraft banked rapidly: it is cropped on the left and right hand sides, and represents a crop from a full print equivalent to about 27” x 18”. The concept of making a print that size, pin sharp with wonderful tonality is stunning.

On the Sunday I had the camera, I headed off to Elmley Marshes NNR. Not a great time of the year – very much in between seasons. However, Elmley is such a magical place, there’s usually something worth seeing. Trundling in the car slowly along the track, I saw a small shape in the far distance on the ground. I pulled over on to the side of the track; a quick peek though binoculars confirmed it was a raptor, as best I could tell it was a marsh harrier. Before I could get the camera set up, pointing out of the car window, a second bird flew in the direction of the first – another harrier. Here is the full frame of the first shot (at 400mm, 1.2 crop).

Juvenile marsh harrier at Elmley: full frame

Of course, this is just a quick grab – not the right lens, fieldcraft or anything. However….

The new arrival made a beeline for the one on the ground, and they started to play. I grabbed a series of shots, just letting the camera go at 7fps for as long as they kept at it. Fairly quickly, one flew off and I lost sight of the other. I followed the one that flew off with the camera: it kept the focus – never wandered – and kept shooting, without the buffer filling up.

They are too far away for exhibition purposes, but at smallish size, suitable crops look great.  The opening image is a compilation from that series of shots.

What was really impressive was the focusing. To lock on to a small moving subject that far away, and never lose it is simply amazing. This is with the group AF, and AF-C setting. The long and short of it is that I could never have got that series on the D700. The focusing would not have been good enough, and the resolution would have been inadequate. A big win for the D810.

Since then, I’ve been to a couple more airshows – the Duxford September show and Shuttleworth Season Finale at Old Warden. I just used the D700 as usual, and I got a bunch of pictures that I really like. Both airshows featured unique opportunities for aviation pictures: the Canadian Lancaster at Dux; two (yes, two) Mew Gulls and the DH88 at OW. The D700 was great to take along because I’m now very familiar with what it can predictably do in my hands. I got some pictures that I’m delighted with. But it hunted for focus once in a while, and I lost most of one series of pictures because the focusing wandered off an aircraft as it accelerated to take off, focusing on the background instead. A low rate of loss, for sure, but I didn’t experience that at all with the D810.

So, for my purposes – and your mileage will definitely vary on this – I think the D810 is the best general purpose camera available.

Is it worth £2400 (roughly the price at present) to me? And what about the D750? Hmm ….

I’ve not shot with the D750, so can’t comment specifically. Before I’d known about the D810, I’d probably have said it was the camera for me. 24MP, 6.5 fps, top of the range AF, tilt screen (excellent for those low down pictures), great low light performance (both the latter being just the job for aircraft nightshoots), about £650 less expensive at the moment: what’s not to like?

Well … Glenn Bloore, an excellent aviation photographer, states the buffer is very small. If he says so, I believe him. Ever since I sat next to Kojak by Derwent Dam as the BBMF Lanc flew over, and he missed the absolute key shot because the buffer was too small, I’ve promised myself I’d never get a camera with a small buffer. I like the idea of the 1.2 crop as well: it turned out so well at Shoreham getting 25 MP on 240-480 mm equivalent. And 36 MP when you need it.

So, if it ever comes to it, the D750/D810 dilemma is quite acute. It is theoretical for the moment, in any case; the piggy bank needs a lot of fattening ;-) .

The trouble with male GAS is that it is never truly rational. I got my LRPS, ARPS and CPAGB with D300 pictures. The D700 is better than the D300.  If I could not get to the next stage of my (extremely slow and intermittent) letter hunt with my current gear, it is not the gear. I don’t doubt that spending £2400 on a trip somewhere exciting would see me closer to the next set of letters. But GAS is like a determined guard dog: once you’re bitten, you stay bitten.

Shoreham Airshow (UK) with a rented D810

DH90A Dragonfly landing in front of Lancing College Chapel

Last weekend I rented a D810, and on the Saturday spent the day at Shoreham for the airshow. I’ve not seen much aviation photography with the D810, and I wanted to know whether it would be a good practical option for this.  My D700 is great for aircraft, which is one reason why I’ve never been tempted by the D800, but the D810 has so many small improvements, it looked very enticing.

I picked it up on the Friday evening and took it out into central London to set it up and give it a first try. Everyone says how good it feels in the hand, and it really does. Once I’d got used to some of the controls, and customized “My Menu” to have my usual items in there (like battery info) and added crop modes (Image Area) and custom setting A6 to turn on/off frame lines, I felt good to go.

Spitfire N3200

The Vulcan banks

The Shoreham airshow is not particularly taxing on a modern auto-focusing system, as there are mainly vintage prop aircraft on display, and even my D70 was (mostly) OK with them ☺. Nevertheless, I wanted to try out the new group AF.

The pictures I’ve put in this post were all taken with the 200-400mm f/4 VR II, except for the monochrome C-47 (24-120mm f/4). All hand held. Just processed through Lightroom 5.6 (except for the banking Vulcan, which had a little additional help from Topaz Clarity). All images were recorded RAW (14-bit NEF, with lossless compression).

Moody Dakota: B&W with Silver Efex Pro 2

I've put a larger set on Flickr. The images here are larger than on Flickr, so worth clicking on these see the full size.

Slightly to my surprise, I found I was using the 1.2 crop a lot. Exiftool tells me that just about 50% of my selects were with the 1.2 crop. About 15% were in DX crop (which I’d expected to use for small aircraft at a distance, but fairly quickly discovered I didn’t really need). The remaining 35% were in FX mode, which was great for anything on the ground or that was large and in flight.

Matrix metering seems very sensitive to any sky in the picture. It is clearly trying to protect highlights (good!) but I found myself dialing in more exposure compensation that usual – up to +1.67 stops for flying aircraft (not helped by the bright grey clouds during the afternoon), and the highlights were still not blown.

F6F takes off. The Group area AF worked perfectly, following the a/c down the runway and not getting distracted by the background.

Focusing worked great. The 200-400 hunted only twice during the whole day (and I’m pretty sure that was due to user error). It locked nicely on to moving subjects and was not distracted by objects in the background. In fact, I don’t think I got a single grossly out of focus image all day. Having said that, I was pushing the shutter speeds at some points to see if the extra pixels would be less sparing on my hand holding technique. My keeper rate always falls off precipitously with any camera below 1/100 when panning at about 400mm, but as it happened, I found I could get enough sharp pictures at 1/80 to get nicely blurred backgrounds on take off or landing. So, all good.

I’m still trying to work out the best processing in Lightroom. Camera Standard and Adobe Standard are very different profiles for the D810, and I’m still trying to decide how best to employ them. Lightroom also seems to have an odd interpretation of the White Balance data. I set the camera to 5560K fixed WB. Lightroom interprets this at about 5950K and adds a tint of -4. Not sure what’s going on there, but not dissimilar to the way it treats my other Nikon images. Nevertheless, Lightroom handles the NEFs well, without much slowing down relative to D700 images.

I also stitched some panos. The image at the end is a three image stitch from FX (36MP) originals. For this, I exported full size 16-bit Tiffs from Lightroom and used the Batch Stitcher in PTGui. This produced a very good pano with no problem. 

RAF Display Typhon pulls vapour: from a 5 MP crop at ISO 800.

Anyhow, I don’t think the pictures in this post will show much that is particularly informative, in the sense that at web resolution, they won’t look much different to a D700 shot. However, the Typhoon shot is a 2841x1887px crop. That represents about 1/6 of the image area, so on a D700 would be a roughly 2MP image: that’s not really enough to do much with, so  that is one extra image I would have missed with the D700. And it was at ISO 800: not too shabby. I don’t like cropping images on the D300 either at ISO 800, so a double win for the D810.

Anyhow, the real test is whether or not the prints look good. I’m going to try to get some images sent off for printing this weekend, so I’ll post a follow up when I have them back.

Two Mustangs and a Spitfire await departure. A three image stitch from FX (36MP) originals. Stitched in the PTGui Batch Stitcher, which handled this with no problem.

A user's review: a year with the Nikon AF-S 24-120mm f/4G ED VR lens

Manhattan from Roosevelt Island. Panorama of 24 overlapping images at 75 mm stitched with PTGui. Larger original

This blog piece is adapted from a forum post I put on DPReview a few weeks ago. Since it is in the nature of forum posts to disappear without trace, it seems worth revising and reposting it on Wonky Horizons.

This piece is a short user's review of the Nikkor 24-140 f/4 G VR lens now that I've had it for just over a year. I've used it mainly with my Nikon D700, and to a lesser extent with my D300.

Bottom line: it is a terrific lens and I'm delighted with it.

I bought this because I wanted a general purpose zoom for the D700: this camera has an FX (full frame, or 35mm equivalent) sensor. For my purposes the focal length range, constant f/4 aperture and VR (vibration reduction otherwise known as image stabilization) were just right. But before buying the lens, I hummed and hawed about the lukewarm to outright negative comments I saw online about it, as well as the price, which was more than I really wanted to pay.

The thing to appreciate is that this is a 5x zoom, and you pay in both money and ultimate image quality for practicality. It can never be expected to match the optical quality of a top-of-the-line 3x zoom (e.g. 24-70mm f/2.8), but it is (relatively!) smaller, lighter and cheaper.  In the end, I gave in and bought one in May last year (from Wex here in the UK, who were cheapest at the time).

I've used it mostly as my go-to lens for day-to-day work. It has been with me walking round cities, for landscape and aviation photography. I've done a fair amount of people photography as well.

I'm posting a few samples below with comments.

The focal length range is great for photographing events. Here's a couple from each end of the range taken when the Olympic Torch came through Canterbury last summer.

The Olympic Torch passes though Canterbury. 24 mm.

Crowds who came to see the Olympic Torch. 120 mm.

It works well with grad or ND filters. The next one is with a Lee ND grad and the one after that has both a ND and a Big Stopper.

Supermarine Spitfire TA805 Mk9 (the Kent Spitfire)

Seasalter beach

VR works great. Here are a couple taken air-to-air with slowish shutter speeds to get full prop circles. The thing about these is that they were taken in aircraft that vibrate significantly, and the VR just helps with sharpness.

Yak-50 "Sasha" And T6

Bulldog G-CBJJ

Some of the criticisms I read focussed on the overall sharpness and general image quality. I've no criticisms here at all. I don't print larger than 18" x 12" usually, and all those I've made at that size are simply pin sharp irrespective of aperture or focal length. (The Spitfire picture above looks great at 18" x 12"!) Similarly a print of the next one is bitingly sharp and detailed.

Fat Tuesday's instruments

I've used it much less on the crop-sensor D300, both because of size and weight (see below), but also because I don't find the focal length range so comfortable on crop-sensor (DX) cameras (your mileage will certainly vary on this point). It works very well on the D300, but needed significant fine focus adjustment (-10), which was not needed on the D700.


Just for my own interest, when I thought of writing this review, I thought I would try a few pictures to compare the nature of the images at f/4 (wide open) with two of my favourite primes at the same aperture: the venerable 105 mm f/2 DC AF-D and 50 mm f/1.4 G AF-S. I took them into my garden, and used a tree trunk as my "model". Using a tripod and exposure delay/remote release, I took some pictures as simple comparators for sharpness just off centre (about where you might put your subject's eyes in a portrait), and quality of the out of focus background.

Comparison of the 24-120 with 105DC and 50mm primes: best to look at the original via link below

Original, larger version here

I was pleased just how good the zoom is: certainly sharp enough for my purposes. Both the primes are sharper at f/4 than the zoom, as expected. But, note that the zoom is sharper than the 105DC when +4R DC is applied: perhaps that's another reason why the 105DC is a flattering portrait lens? The bokeh of the 105DC is, as I'd hoped, much better, especially with the +4DC, but I'd have no qualms at all about using the zoom for an outdoor portrait if I'd not got either of the primes with me.

Just a couple of other points. Vignetting, distortion and colour fringing? I never even notice them becuase I have the Lightroom lens profile set to apply automatically to my Raw images. The lens does vignette and there is colour fringing (see examples in Mansurov's review), but Lightroom's corrections are so good, they're not an issue.

Sealing? I've not got this lens very wet in the rain, but no problems so far (fingers crossed). In terms of dust access, I've recently come back from Fairford, having spent 5 days in dry, dusty fields and by active runways. Dust everywhere: I didn't change lenses on either the D700 (which had this lens on, or the D300, which had the 200-400 on) for that reason. But at the end of that time, there was no more dust on the D700 sensor than there was at the beginning of the week (and the same applies to the D300). I'm very, very happy about that.

What don't I like about it? Size and price. The price now, here in the UK, is even more expensive than when I bought it, and you'll want to think long and hard about whether the Nikon 24-85mm f3.5-4.5 AF-S G VR Lens (or a third party lens) would suit you equally well at lower cost.

After a year with this lens, I would not change my mind. I'll take the constant f/4 and wider focal length range, even with the greater cost.

But size. This is a big lens. I've always been one for small cameras, and having "grown up" in photographic terms with an OM2n, I'm still amazed (and slightly horrified!) that I've ended up with something as big and heavy as the D700/24-120 combination.

On the way to Earls Court for the Olympic Volleyball

Flare is well controlled: note the sun in the image above, top right (see also my picture of the Red Arrows/A400M flyover: Flickr or in the previous post).

Poland fans at the Olympic volleyball

I spent some time during the Olympics walking round London with the D700/24-120 (and the 50mm in the bag as well) and I took it on a visit to the US at the end of last year. Although in technical terms it is perfect for me as a walk-around combination, in the end it is just too heavy and big to enjoy carrying for a whole day walking in a city. I've gone back to the D300 and 18-70mm zoom for the moment as my day-out-in-a-city stand by.

Dolphin and Girl, Tower Bridge

But, if you can cope with the size and weight, the lens is great for tourism.

In summary
Overall, my view is that this is a terrific lens. It is possible that one day I may supplement my gear with a small mirrorless camera, but I can't imagine ever replacing this lens with something else in my DSLR kit. You'll still find it in my cold dead hands.