I truly am loving this camera. My D800 was great.. but everything is tweaked just enough to make the D810 the perfect camera. Here's some of the stuff I've done with this wonderful camera the past couple of months:
This was shot at 3200 ISO. The D810 has no trouble at all getting the focus just right and there is still incredible detail.
Eth3rton, those were taken in Swakopmund, Namibia.
Lightsearcher, I find the D810 a monumental improvement over my D700 for long exposures. I don't feel the need to use LeNR for exposures shorter than 3 minutes. The bright pixels visible in a 3 minute exposure are so few, that it's easy enough to edit out manually. Sometimes it seems a 30sec exposure without LeNR with the D700 at base ISO produces more bright pixels than the D810 at 3 minutes. The vast majority of my long exposures are around 30 seconds, and haven't found a single bright pixel so far. Also, the temperatures here in Namibia are erring on the hot side at the moment... 35șC during the day in-land and about 25șC at the coast on a sunny day, so don't have favourable ambient temperatures either.
[EDIT] Lightsearcher, I would recommend PixelFixer to do bias or dark frame subtraction, image blending using different blend modes, and hot pixel removal on a RAW file level. It's simple to use, easily ported to Mac using WINE. There is one problem though, it doesn't yet support the D810, and who knows how long that will take judging by the intervals between updates... there is a workaround though, but I have only tinkered with it a tiny bit after figuring this out an hour ago
1) I use the LR plugin called LensTagger to change the EXIF tags of the D810 camera to "NIKON D800".
2) Run these through PixelFixer.
3) I re-import the new RAW files, which now have totally scrambled previews, and change the camera EXIF tag bag to "NIKON D810" and select "read metadata from files"
4) While the previews are still totally wrong, and will seemingly stay that way, in develop module they will be back to normal; At least once zoomed in and then back out.
It's a little bit of a mission, but worth it if the final result will benefit from it. It's annoying that the 1:1 or smart previews in LR5 are not re-rendered properly after the conversion. I have not found a fix for this.
[UPDATE] It seems that dark frame subtraction isn't working. I'm not sure why.
I've been in contact with the author of PixelFixer, and have sent him the D810 NEF files he still needed. Hopefully it won't be too long until an update comes out!
Bellow is another long exposure from Swakopmund, using the highly underrated AF-D 50 f/1.8.
I was very exeptic about the D810 IQ and performance, I thought it is only a Nikon D610 with 12 MP more but now that I'm trying and playing with the files all I can say is "It is the best DSRL I've ever had".
I thought it is only a Nikon D610 with 12 MP more
As impressive as the gain in IQ will bear out, it's the superior AF and
processing speed that brought ME to the table. (already had a D800)
