I'm one of those weird freaks that needs to read a new product's instructions in it's entirety prior to diving in to start playing. Some may say I have remarkable patients not just jumping in and playing with the hottest new Nikon since the D3s, but it's really just my strange idiosyncrasy of reading the instructions first that has held me back up till now. It's now been some time since I first received the Nikon D4, a whole week actually. A week to you might not seem like a lot, but for me it seems an eternity, especially since I've been waiting for this camera for what seems years. Having muddled about in the digital SLR realm since the introduction of the D200 in 2006, then most recently the D7000 in 2011, the D4 will be my first real pro kit since my beloved Nikon F4 from years past. Well I have now had a chance to read through the instructions, in their entirety, and had an opportunity to give the D4 a go during this past weeks Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) monthly meeting at HBO in New York City.
The meeting was held in the beautiful HBO auditorium just as it had been in 2011. I was familiar with this theater as I had photographed the very same meeting one year earlier! Last year I was testing out the Nikon D7000 and used a combination of flash and available light to produce some very nice images. This year, being that the D4 has been herald as the best low light camera on the market, I went 100% available light. Not only that, I shot almost everything at ISO 12,800, yes that's right ISO 12,800! Quite remarkable I must say. I probably could have gotten away with ISO 3200 as I did last year but I really wanted to increase my shutter speeds in order to work fast and not worry so much about remaining rock steady all evening.
First off I'll say working with the Nikon D4 was a pleasure right off the bat. The ergonomics and button placements on this camera just felt so natural in my hands. The camera is not small mind you, but my hands aren't that small either. Working with the smaller D7000 always seemed a bit cramped to me, whereas the D4 seemed just right. Being that it is a full frame, full bodied camera I believe it weighs in at around three pounds. That weight seems well balanced when paired up with large telephotos or zoom lenses. I was primarily shooting with an 80-200mm f/2.8, and then a bit with a 35-135 f/3.5-4.5 That combination worked very well, especially for this shoot.
Rarely do I ever shoot faster that one frame at a time. The D4 is capable of firing off up to 11 frames per second and perhaps one day I'll play with that, if only just to hear the Nikon sound like a machine gun! What was interesting to me however was that even though I had the camera set to single frame mode, the shutter was so responsive that I was able to fire off many rapid shots without going full auto so to speak. Kind of like the three round burst I am so fond of, however that is another topic altogether now isn't it.
The quality of the images at ISO 12,800 is pretty damn impressive if you ask me, not perfect but pretty damn impressive indeed. My image settings for this shoot were NEF RAW, lossless compressed at 14bit. High ISO noise was certainly present in these images but nowhere near what we had ever seen before at these levels. To be honest I was quite blown away when I previewed the fist few shots made at ISO 12,800 and that was just the unprocessed RAW files viewed in the cameras 3.2" LCD.
One more notable item was that I was recording the images to a brand new Sony 16Gig XQD card. No lag was detected at all, not that I would have expected it. It worked just fine. I just wish the XQD cards would come down in price a bit as they seem a bit pricier than the same size CF cards at the moment.
I used Adobe Lightroom 4 to process and edit the NEF RAW files. I applied minimal corrections to the images, the usual stuff you know. A bit of white balance here, a tad of clarity there, a smidgen of contrast over there, and a crop or two.
More examples of this test can be found on my flickr page. http://www.flickr.com/photos/landon-smyth/sets/72157629803525106/
All in all I am very happy with the Nikon D4 so far. I have many more tests and experiments to preform with this fine new camera and I look forward to sharing them with you.


