I finally broke down and ordered my new camera.  I’d been debating for months on what I should get and finally decided on a Nikon D800E.  I knew this camera would take exceptional images, but I will admit I was a bit worried about 36 mega-pixals and the file sizes that would result from such a high resolution camera.  I studied and learned as much as I could about how best to post-process such large files and finally came to the conclusion it would work for me.  Some people have had to get new computers just to edit the images produced by this phenomenal camera, but my 1 Terabyte hard drive, 12 Gig Ram iMac is doing just fine.

So after placing my order I waited a week for it to finally arrive on December 5th.  I immediately threw in a battery and memory card and headed down to the waterfront to snap some test shots.  Here is one one of the first images I took that day.  It was a cloudy day that didn’t offer up a lot of beauty, but even with the clouds I found that this camera has great dynamic range and plenty of detail.  This shot has had very little post-processing.  I just increased the exposure by about 1/3 stop.  I wasn’t necessarily shooting for composition since I was just testing the camera for sharpness and detail.  I’m including the original image as well as a 100% crop out of the center just to show how sharp the detail is.  You’ll notice that the crop is just one boat out of many in the photo and it too looks very sharp!  I’m really excited about being able to crop in tight on some of my wildlife photos in the future.

Shooting Info: Handheld, 1/800 sec at f/2.8, ISO 100, 24mm (Nikon 24-70 mm at f/2.8)  Original image size 7360 x 4912.  Shot in RAW, converted to DNG format (digital negative) upon import into Lightroom.  DNG file size 34.7 mb

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