Ok, so I guess the idea of naming the D4 Excalibur is growing on me. Sorry. Anyway, been playing with it all weekend, finally took her out for a real world test run at a Search and Rescue training session last night. Figured it would be dark and horrible lighting and a good test venue. I am stunned by the results.
Orange tinted sodium vapor lights, people with LED flashlights all over the place, some fluorescent lighting. At night. No flash. All these pics are ambient light with next to nothing done post processing. Some cropping, played with the white balance on a couple, but no noise reduction and very minimal other adjustments. Pretty sure if I had taken the time to dial in a custom white balance it would have worked out better, but wanted to see how the auto WB coped with the hellish mixed conditions. Also learned that while the auto ISO feature is awesome, I have to change the way I shoot to use it effectively. I usually watch the meter in the viewfinder and if I decide I want to under/over expose something I would either adjust shutter or aperture accordingly. Well, when I do that on the D4 with auto iso active, it adjust the ISO to compensate. Guess I will actually have to start using the exposure compensation adjustment, or shoot in another mode. Anyway, this was a pretty difficult shooting scenario but the Excalibur did the heavy lifting so I could just shoot. As expected, this beast is far more capable than I am and is going to force me to up my game to keep up.
On the bright side, using the DX lenses in FX mode works great in the dark, can't even see the dark edge on the 35mm 1.8DX shots unless you're looking for it. The 24-70mm is still in the shop with hope it can be saved, and the 70-200mm wasn't wide enough for a lot of what I wanted to get.
You can see the how we did here.
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