So I just got the new Nikon D810. It’s the first new DSLR camera I’ve bought in over six years, since I bought my trusty Nikon D300. It’s been awhile.

So why now and why this camera? You may know that I’ve got a workshop to Canada’s Northwest Territories coming up. One of our main targets will be the auroras. We hope to be photographing them every night if we can. And since I’ve never photographed auroras I needed to learn more. Thankfully, one of my readers told me about a great ebook on photographing auroras. How to Photograph the Northern Lights by Patrick Endres is packed full of all the scientific stuff about why auroras appear and how to predict and find them. It also has gobs of good information about photographing them.

A major consideration while photographing at night is noise. And when photographing auroras and stars you usually need a shutter speed that’s faster than 30 seconds, depending on the focal length of your lens. And to get to these shutter speeds you need fast lenses and high ISO. Fast lenses are not a problem. I can rent a faster wide-angle zoom (the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 is very highly regarded). But my old Nikon D300 is rather noisy at higher ISO. Sure I can use noise reduction software, but that might also blur the stars too much. My other option was a newer DSLR with good high ISO performance. The Nikon D800 gets really high marks in this. But the D810 just came out and it’s not that much more than the D800.

Anyway, I was outlining all of these options to my wife Tracy and she said I should just get the D810. But it’s $3300. It’s your craft. It’s $3300. You haven’t bought a new camera in over six years. It’s $3300. But it’s your craft. You need it. It’s $3300. You could sell one of your other cameras. Sure, I’ll get about $200 for my D200. See, the new camera is practically paid for. Now it’s $3100. Blink. Ok, I’ll think about it. Good, I have to go to work, have a nice day. Evil woman.

So now I have a D810. And I really like it. Live View works just like I always thought it should. Canon users can change the aperture and see the depth of field change in Live View. With my D300 I couldn’t do this,  Live View showed  the view at the widest aperture only. Now I can.

And I can better help workshop participants who have had, until now, much better cameras than I. Instead of poking buttons and guessing at features I have no experience with, I’ll be able to BS with a bit more authority.

And an indoor shot taken at ISO 800 showed no noise at all that I can see.

But I’m wondering what I’m going to do with 36 Megapixels per image. A 16-bit TIFF made from one of these is over 200 Megabytes! Fortunately, there’s an NEF-small option that captures the same full-frame but with fewer Megapixels: 9 Megapixels. I wish this was more like 12 or 16 Megapixels, and maybe some future firmware revision will allow for this, but it’s a nice option to have.

I’ve not had a lot of time with the camera, I just got it three days ago, but I’m looking forward to trying things like the highlight priority exposure mode and the HDR feature. And video. I’ve not done much (any!) video so there’s a lot to learn there.

But I’m amazed at the sharpness of the images I’m getting. This image is actually a combination of 14 images focused at different points and assembled with Zerene Stacker. I processed the full resolution NEF files to full resolution 16-bit TIFFs and then opened all 14 in Zerene Stacker. Zerene continues to amaze me. It took about three minutes for Zerene to stack these images. Fourteen 200 Megabyte images processed and stacked in three minutes! That would have taken Photoshop at least 37 hours. Or maybe a little faster than that. But it would have been a lot longer and I doubt the results would be as good.

I’m excited to see what this camera can do. And I’m excited that I’ll once again be able to use my 24mm f/2.8 as a wide angle lens. In the film days, this lens was my only wide angle lens and I have a lot of fond memories of using it. I really enjoyed looking at the world through 24mm eyes.