My First D800 Shots

Hello everyone,

I haven't posted in a long time due to a more and more busy schedule at work and little free time available for photography.

I sold all of my Pentax gear to fund a D800 with a bunch of lenses.  The reason was two fold. First I was quite unhappy with my K5's autofocus performance.  It was very unreliable and I was tired of Pentax crappy QC and expensive lenses (for what you get).  Second, I've always wanted to have greater depth of field control.  Fullframe was the answer to this, so I shot two birds with one (expensive) stone.

So here it is.  These are among the first shots I took with my newly acquired D800. I will write a post describing the switch in more details later, but for now I can already say the D800 is a very impressive camera!

The Nikkor 50mm 1.8G has very impressive IQ given it costs 180chf and it delivers sharp images already straight from the max aperture! The amount of details captured by the sensor is truly amazing although to take advantage of it one has to use a good technique and good glass of course.  The AF is out of this world, especially after having been used to the poor reliability of Pentax AF.  I can fully use my 50mm wide-open and trust the AF.  Quite a game changer.

All shots below were taken with either a Nikkor 50mm 1.8G or a Nikkor AF 20mm 2.8.

Sunflower field with impressive sun beams:

Geneva's old town:

Close-up on a sunflower in order to test the 50mm bokeh (very good in my opinion):

La Vie en Rose - 50mm @ f/1.8:

Dramatic looking sun beams:

The next series are all shot at 6400 ISO. It was mostly to test the high ISO IQ of the D800. I'm really impressed. At the pixel level it's very similar to the Pentax K5 I used to have, but after downsizing it's quite a different ball game.

Geneva's fountain - 50mm @ 6400 iso:

My wife is always a good sport - 50mm @ f/1.8 and 6400 iso:

Bokeh test on the paddle boats (it was very dark) - 50mm @ f/1.8 and 6400 iso:

That's it for now! I hope you enjoyed these few shots until my next post - hopefully before 2013 ;)