Ignight Festival, the full report

  So, last weekend I had the privilege of shooting the Ignight Fire and Flow Festival, held at Joshua Tree  Lakes campground in Southern California. This was an epic weekend. I attended the festival last year as both a medical volunteer and participant, and was eagerly looking forward to this year's event. Last year, I had to pretty much be on call the whole weekend since it was close to the birth of the corporate mascot, but I went to a lot of workshops and had a blast. At that point I was still waiting for the D3200 I had ordered and was just preparing to dive back in to the world of photography. This year I was really looking forward to not only taking more workshops and learning some new things from the masters, but also getting the chance to spend several nights shooting away and experimenting with different ways of shooting fire performers. Then news got even better when I found out it would be a new moon, which meant it would be dark and far enough away from city lights to take a stab at shooting some of my first star trails.
  Got in on Thursday afternoon, set up camp, had dinner, then did my first star trail attempt. Left the camera shooting for three hours, only to find out in the morning that I had confused interval and time lapse modes, so I had a 30 second movie instead of 300+ images to stack into trails. Ooops.
  Friday morning started with bacon and mimosas, then I headed off to get some massive learning started. Good thing I had the camera to turn to, because during my first workshop it quickly became obvious that some trapeze damage to my left shoulder and back (i.e.- those muscles basically took the impact of a bad landing and sacrificed them selves to keep me from literally breaking my neck) wasn't as healed as I thought it was, so I was at a flow conference and unable to spin. (well, I could as long as I didn't do anything that required bringing my left arm above shoulder level...) I found some really awesome massage practitioners who worked on me, and it did help a lot, but between the injury residue and the insane heat, I wasn't able to spin much at all without my muscles totally locking up, so I got to spend even more time than I planned concentrating on photography.
    I mentioned the heat in the quick post, but it was brutal enough that it deserves a second mention. It was freaking hot. So hot that even if the camera was in the bag, left in the shade, it would be almost too hot to touch after about ten minutes. If it was dangling from the strap in open sunlight, it was more like 2 minutes and it was almost hot enough to require gloves to handle. Having read a lot about sensor heating while researching for star trails, as well as having had iphones, watches and other gadgets shut down from heat when I was racing triathlons, I was really worried about the camera overheating, but neither the D4 nor the D3200 had any obvious issues with the temperature besides being hot to the touch. My initial plan was to use the D3200 as my daytime walk around camera, because it was much lighter and has higher resolution, but I hadn't taken one key limitation into account. I was mostly shooting people, which meant even though it was insanely bright outside, I still wanted to shoot wide open on my lenses to isolate my subjects and needed to use fill flash to counteract the very hard mid day sunlight. After about a half hour walking around on Friday i realized that the D3200 is not capable of using auto FP high speed sync, thus I was not able to shoot at anything faster than 1/200 second. Since I didn't have any neutral density filters with me, this meant I couldn't shoot wide apertures to get the shallow depth of field I wanted for my shots. So I had to pull out Excalibur even for the daytime stuff, so I could use fill flash wide open at the shutter speeds necessary to make it all work.
   The heat actually wound up sort of introducing me to some of my best shots. I saw another photographer who was looking pretty beat down by the heat, brought him to the trailer for some AC, soda an a popsicle to cool him off. Hanging out with him and his girlfriend led to meeting Mystic and Maya and getting to shoot their Sensual Movement workshop, which was one of my favorite sets of the weekend. They were both beautiful, sensual, incredible women who were trying to show that anyone could be sexy, and that is something I truly believe. This may be hard for some people to digest, but sexy has absolutely nothing to do with a person's physical looks. I have seen many people that had supermodel looks, but were not at all sexy because of some personality issue, usually stemming from lack of self confidence. Conversely, I have known some people who, despite not being what society in general would call "hot" are the most incredibly sexy people I know simply because of how they carry themselves. I am deliberately trying to avoid using gender specific pronouns, because- while I am hetero(flexible) and thus tend to focus on the ladies, the workshop also had its' complement of totally sexy guys as well. The workshop, besides being photographic gold, was amazing to watch because I think everyone that took part in it, male or female, young or old, left with a little more self confidence than they came in with, and was a  bit more able to believe that they could be sexy. I felt very honored that all the participants allowed me to shoot the workshop and to be a part of that wonderful energy.
    Later on that evening it was time to shoot the opening ceremony- after a wonderfully beautiful golden hour that I only got to slightly enjoy because I had to at least pay some attention to the fire safety brief I was attending at the time. I found a good spot on top of the DJ booth/Bugaloo Bus, slapped on the 70-200 and waiting for it to start. The opening ceremony this year was epic, got some great shots,
missed several more because I was laughing too hard to focus.

    It was basically Disney presents a fire festival..... some great songs from the little mermaid, beauty and the beast, and other disney stories set to fire dance. In short it was AWESOME!

    After the opening, I went to grab some dinner, then decided I was too tired to head back out, so I set the camera up for another shot at star trails and went to bed. This time it worked.
   

    Not the best star trail shot out there, but I'll take it as the first real effort at it with the right camera mode and settings. May have to make a special trip out to the deep desert to do some more of these, especially once I get a wide angle lens.
     Saturday again started with bacon and mimosas, then it was out to wander the festival and see what there was to shoot, and also play a little with the acro yoga workshop because my shoulder was ok for most of that. Got some really awesome massage work done on my shoulder thanks to a couple of very awesome therapists, so I decided to hit the knife throwing and archery workshops, not only to play a little with sharp objects but also to give the continuous high speed shutter a serious workout. Already posted about how well that worked out so won't recap here.
   One of the organizers asked me to shoot some shots of the merchants that they could use as PR for other merchants, so tried to get a little that would fit that. Not really sure I nailed that request, but hopefully there will be something they can use. But as I was doing laps of the lake waiting for fun stuff in the merch booths, I saw a great couple and got one of my favorite shots from the weekend.

    Then it was time for fire photography lab. Spent the rest of Saturday night at the fire circle just shooting away and trying different settings, speeds, etc. I wound up shooting all ambient light, for a couple of reasons. Part of it was I didn't want to break anyone's flow up and annoy them with flashes in their face when I hadn't talked to them about it first. But mostly it was pure laziness. I didn't feel like putting up stands, setting up the remotes, then moving them around every time I wanted to shoot from a different angle. I also figured there would be enough for me to learn without adding the extra complication. I have done a few tries to use flash to capture a still spinner and still get long exposure trails without getting one that I can say nailed it, but when I do that I think I want to actually set up somewhere and get someone to spin just for me to shoot in a controlled environment until I get enough of a feel for it to try it in the wild on that scale. But mostly, it was just me being lazy. Still, I managed to learn a lot.
    For instance- timing is very important for lots of reasons. Even without the flash to stop motion, if I saw a good moment where the spinner was basically still and just moving the tools, I was able to get a decent combo of still spinner with good trails with just ambient light. 1/10 sec seemed to be the magic number for me to do this.

I also found that shooting smaller apertures gave much better images of the flames, but I was amazed at how much variety of light levels different tools put out. Really small fire wouldn't give enough ambient light to really see the spinner with smaller apertures, or even wide open unless I waited until the tool happened to be right in front of the face giving good illumination. For example, this was shot wide open at 1/50 sec f2.8. (iso 500)

Some bigger tools, on the other hand, threw out  a massive amount of light. This shot was 1/30 sec, F22. (iso 12,800) No, I didn't miss a decimal place there. I meant F22.

    Often, there were so many spinners going simultaneously that the circle was actually very well lit, This one was 1/30 Sec F2.8 (ISO 1800)

    Heh, guess that goes to show how quickly I have become spoiled by Excalibur's capabilities in low light, I just called an ISO 1800 shot well lit. Guess that is also a reflection of my typical shooting environment. Actually, as I go back over my pics really looking into settings, I think next time I shoot fire like this I will turn off the auto ISO functionality so I can really see what the light is doing without the camera brain compensating so much. I really love not having to worry about ISO, but don't want to get too used to relying on the crutch.
    I also learned that the smoke haze from a large group of spinners will effect shots, making them look hazy, but 9 times out of 10 I was able to fix that, or at least reduce it significantly by bumping up the black point in post.
   So, overall, it was hot, very very very hot. I was a bit bummed about my shoulder and not getting to really play in any of the workshops, but that was more than made up for by the chance to really spend a weekend shooting and experimenting, and meeting so many awesome (and very photogenic) people.

You can see my full galleries from the weekend at this link, but I will leave you with one last image. This martial artists broke a stack of flaming bricks. It was pretty freaking epic and definitely captured the spirit of awesomeness that permeated the weekend. Glad I was in the right place at the right time to shoot this.

First postings from Ignight Festival... Excalibur isn't just a sword, it's also a Machine Gun! (and a time lapse interval shooting machine...)

  Last weekend I had the pleasure of shooting Ignight Fire and Flow festival in Joshua Tree, Ca. Since my shoulder was hurt and I couldn't really do any spinning, it wound up being an advanced photo lab for me. I had a blast, learned lots of things, got some great shots, reconnected with some old friends and also made some new friends. I will be slowly going through all the images and posting galleries throughout the next week until I get them all up, this is the first installment.

  One quick lesson was that 110 degree temperatures presented an unexpected challenge. I expect metal items left out in direct sunlight to get warm. No surprise there. But I did not expect this to happen to my camera in the short intervals it was dangling from my strap. But it did. So, I decided to keep it in the camera bag and in the shade when I wasn't shooting. The real surprise was that even that didn't help. Pulling the camera out of the bag even when it was kept in the shade it was almost too hot to handle. (I won't even mention the water bottles and trying to drink hot water all day) I was worried about the sensor getting overheated, but it never did. Exalibur handled the heat better than me. But next time I will wear gloves.

  Lessons two and three are expansions on my prior review of the D4. I got to really put a couple of features of the D4 to the test on this trip. First, I decided that since I was in the desert on a weekend with no moon, I would try to capture some star trails. I had tried once previously on a SAR campout, but didn't have any luck. This time came out better. First I tried the "time lapse" mode. What I didn't realize was that the time lapse mode automatically takes all the shots and collapses them into a movie file. This is a cool feature I will have to play with later, but not what I was looking for to create star trails. Thus ended Thursday night. Did a bit more research and manual reading, turns out that what I wanted was interval shooting. So, I set up a roughly 3 hour series of 30 second exposures, wide open on the 24-70mm, pointed at the North Star. Combined them afterwards using the StarStaX App for Mac. You can see some light pollution from passing spinners, and it isn't as clean as I would like, but as a first real attempt at it I am pretty darn satisfied.

   The other feature I finally really got to test out was machine gun mode... continuous high speed shooting. It was so bright and sunny during the day that I had plenty of light to shoot at stupid high shutter speeds, so I headed out to the knife throwing and archery workshops Saturday afternoon. I put Excalibur into machine gun more, and tried to get some shots of knives and arrows in flight. Got lots of good knife shots, managed to get a couple of passable ones at archery. Archery was harder, difficult even shooting 10fps at 1/8000sec. Did the math after talking to one of the instructors, the bows they were using would give roughly a 200 foot per second arrow speed, so in the tenth of a second between frames that arrow would travel roughly 20ft. The knife throwing was also easier to time, it's pretty obvious on a throw when the thrower is going to release, but archers draw and aim, take their time, and if there are tells that let you know when they are about to release, I am not familiar enough to notice them. But still, managed to get a couple of arrows in flight. Something I never managed to do with the D3200.

   

   So, that's the first installment, full galleries will be viewable here as I get them uploaded. Enjoy!

Excalibur needs a new arch nemesis.....

   Ok, despite feeling sick and not really wanting to head down, I have to say I am glad I did. The battle was epic...

Sparks Flew....

   Settings were set. (and reset, and reset, and reset)  Flashes were flashed.  (not mine, but the timing on this was perfect and I managed to capture another shooter blasting away!)

Drinks were drunk. In the end, Excalibur emerged victorious, and I now have best problem you can have as a photographer- too many technically good keeper shots. (good think I have an awesome partner who goes through them and helps me pic the best artistic shots)

     Full gallery and show report coming soon, but initial image review shows that the evil red wash has been defeated!

So, my old enemy.... we meet again......

   Another event at the Ruby Room tonight. Apparently they are soon going to close and remodel or something, the event page says this will be the last show at the Ruby Room in its' present form. Thus, despite the fact that I am sick, my parents are in town, and I have a lot to do, I think I must go out and shoot tonight, because this may be the last chance I get to jump into the ring again and face my arch nemesis down with some new techniques and see if they work. So, dinner with the parents, lots of caffeine, and a battle against the lighting at the Ruby Room. Game on!

A new experiment - my first showing!

Flier for my first official Showing.... Info below.

    So, I was once again on my favorite place for work and entertainment, Craigslist, and saw an ad for RAW Artists, looking for new artists. Sent in an application, and got picked to do an event on June 20th. Not really sure what to make of this gig. Their site looks good, and I really like their mission of giving exposure to up and coming talent (in this case, I hope, mine!) The catch is, they fund their events by requiring a minimum ticket sales amount from participating artists. I need to sell at least 20 tickets to my fan base or I will actually wind up owing them for the show in addition to the outlay for prints and setup.

    This is where you, my fan base, come in. I will be turning this into a Facebook event and sending an invite out that way as the date gets closer, but if you are reading this, located in San Diego, and think it looks like a cool event, no reason to wait. You can get tickets in my name HERE!

    Not sure what to expect really. I will have a 10x10ft chain link fence to set up with provided by the venue, and a light. That's it. Looks like there are two other photographers. My plan right now is to use half the space to display prints of various sizes, and make the other half of the space into a small photo booth. So people can come in, get a portrait or fun pic done, take a card, and get prints later off my web site, or a digital copy to post on their FB or whatever. It looks like a pretty industrial club with some good beams, if I can manage a spot under a good rigging point I will put up a low trapeze bar or hammock and get people taking pics on the apparatus, which should be cool and really set me apart, but that will be location dependent.

    So, taking another giant leap into the unknown- could use a little help from you- my readers. Other than the obvious way of helping me out by buying tickets and showing up, If you have a particular favorite image(s) you think would be great to print up and showcase, let me know which ones you recommend. If you are in one of my images and don't mind it being placed up for sale, let me know and we'll do a model release and I will split the sale profit with you. If you have any good ideas for how to make my booth interesting and this first adventure a success, pass them my way. Finally, if you happen to be a graphic artist or designer and feel like hooking me up with a banner in exchange for some photo work, drop me a line. But mostly, just come out, have a good time, enjoy the show, get your pic taken and keep me company for a while. Dark beers also accepted!

Cashing in on gay marriage?

 Ok- not really sure how to start this one off, or what angle to take it. Been churning it since the shoot last weekend, still haven't come up with what I want to say. So hopefully a beer (or three) and some free typing will get to what I want to say. So let me start by saying it is hard to answer the question, "do I support gay marriage," or "do I support equal rights for the LGBT community?" The reason it is so hard for me to answer is that, really, the question never would have occurred to me without all the current media hype, it's rather like someone asking, "so, do you support oxygen and people's right to breath it?" It's not even an issue for me, everyone should have the right to live and love as they please as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. But if I have to take a side, I totally support equal rights for all and the right for everyone to be married if they so chose.

  So what the hell does this have to do with photography you might ask? Why the hell is this in my professional blog, instead of on my personal Facebook? Well, last weekend I got a gig shooting a couple for OutViewOnline, part of a series on honeymoon destinations. Met the couple at the Dana Hotel on a Saturday morning. Before we started shooting, met up with the hotel manager, who explained to me that the hotel was incredibly supportive of gay marriage, but all their wedding advertising featured heterosexual couples, so they were looking for some shots to use to try to help their position in the new market. The idea was I do the shoot, guess it was supposed to be an engagement shoot (even though the models- while actually a couple, weren't engaged) and later this summer I come back and shoot a wedding at the hotel. All I could think about was the Prop 8 Musical video from a couple years ago.... if you haven't seen it, check out the link. It's a riot, basically the gay marriage advocates convince the conservatives by explaining how much money there is to be made by allowing gay marriage and opening up the new market.  Admittedly, I am a cynic, but hey, if the hotel wants to expand their marketing, who am I to argue. But really, as much as I hope it's not just a marketing ploy, the couple wasn't actually engaged, who knows when/if this mysterious wedding will happen or not, bottom line was I couldn't get Neil Patrick Harris out of my head the whole morning.

   Ok. Enough with the background, how did the shoot go? Overall I wasn't happy with it. It really was the worst of all possible worlds. Late morning bordering on noon. Worst light of the day. My "models," while not really engaged, were a real couple, and not experienced models. And they were both slightly hung over from going out the night before. Couple this with my inexperience with directing models, you have a recipe for disaster. What I didn't realize until later on looking to see if any of the pics wound up on the web site yet, was that this same couple has done several of these shoots at various locations before. Thus, in addition to being hung over, they were also bored with the photography side of these little adventures they were having on the magazine's dime. I was just basically the price they had to pay to get their vacation.  But anyway, the shoot was decked against me from the start.

    Technically, I can deal with bad light. That's my job as a photographer. Bright daylight, use some fill flash to kill the shadows. Ideally, I would have been able to find some shade to put them in, or if I was really high speed, a couple of assistants could have followed us with a flat to hold over them and create our own shade just out of the frame. I would have set up a couple of radio fired strobes off camera to fill the shadows and life would have been good. Alas, I had no budget, no assistant, and barely an hour to shoot all over the hotel and grounds, so I had to make do with on camera flash and a diffuser. And hung over models who couldn't help but squint into the mid day sun.

   My biggest weakness was really brought out by this shoot. I am not comfortable yet directing and posing models. It's a totally new arena for me, I am used to shooting events in motion, performers at work, or generic crowd shots in a photojournalistic style. Lifestyle portraiture, where I catch my subject spontaneously and organically in the middle of what they are doing. I am good at that. But not so much the manufactured posing. Give me a model who knows what they are doing and I am fine, I can capture them as they work, (see image below, the model dragged me into this restroom and basically told me to start shooting while she did her stuff. I did her bidding and got some great stuff. Wish all the models were as awesome as the firebird)

but I have a long way to go before I will be comfortable directing models. The best moments I was able to come up with was when I could get them to laugh a bit and forget to be "posing," I would crack some jokes, like telling them to look into each others eyes and pretend they loved each other... or since it was an engagement shoot, to take the life preserver from the pool, use it as an engagement ring and propose to each other... I think I managed to get a few real moments. At least when I looked at the rest of the series I could say my pics were at least as good, if not better, than the rest of the series so far , so I feel a bit better. Anyway, until the article gets posted on Outview, you can see my gallery here and tell me what you think. 
 


 

Non Technical Nikon D4 Review.

        There are many reviews out there of the Nikon D4. I know this because I read through every one of them I could find when I was contemplating upgrading. So why am I writing yet another one? Well, it seemed to me that all of those reviews were by experienced professional photographers for other experienced professional photographers- mostly along the lines of "it's great, but is it worth upgrading from your D3S or not?" While those reviews were informative, they didn't really answer my questions as someone going for their first professional level body. So, now that I have had Excalibur for a month or two and have put her through some fun test shoots, I am venturing into review land once again in case there are other people who find themselves where I was and are contemplating the heart stopping decision to turn a massive amount of cash into a D4 body. So I hope to answer the question of whether it is worth it to go all the way up to the D4 if you are contemplating an upgrade to your first pro body. I won’t be able to compare to the D800 or D600, but you can also find plenty of that flavor on google.

   

    For those just tuning in for the review, here is a little history and how I came to this point. I have dabbled in photography for two decades, from back in the film age, but had taken a break from serious (D)SLRs for a few years until last year, when life events brought me back to photography. I didn’t have a large budget getting back into it, so after looking around for a while, I picked up a Nikon D3200 and spent as much as I had left on good glass, then upgraded glass as I could. Earlier this year, I realized that since the bulk of what I was shooting was low light, high speed performance work, and to get the images I wanted in that environment I needed to upgrade my camera body. Full frame was the only way to go for that, so I pretty much had to choose between a D4, used D3S, D800 or D600. You can goback and read some of the older posts here detailing the decision process but I finally decided to go all the way from Nikon's lowest entry level body to the top of the line D4. Found a Nikon refurbished one for about $1000 less than new at KEH Camera and pulled the trigger. Spoiler alert- NO REGRETS!

    Unboxing and First Impressions:

    Arrived on schedule in a grey refurb box. Other than the box color there was no way to tell this was not a brand new camera (even shutter count was at 0). First impression was "holy smokes, this thing is HUGE!" The D3200 is definitely on the small end for DSLR bodies and I had grown used to that, but even compared to the D800/600 bodies the D4 is massive. It is a tank. Apparently it is slightly lighter than the D3S, but if you are coming from anything except another large professional body, be prepared to be slightly overwhelmed by the size of this beast. That being said, the ergonomics are excellent. I have average size hands but despite its' size the D4 fits like a glove, whether in horizontal or vertical orientation. The camera is so comfortable and easy to hold, in fact, that unless I am going to be doing a lot of climbing or walking around for any significant length of time, I don't even bother to put on a strap, I just hold it and feel totally comfortable letting it dangle by a couple of fingertips on the grip ridge. The only slight negative I can give in the handling arena is that the depth of field preview and function button on the grip side of the lens are hard to reach when shooting vertically. The important controls are all duplicated so as far as your hand is concerned, although not quite as comfortable as horizontal, there is no noticeable difference in control placement or function when switching to vertical orientation. Which is awesome, because it seems like I spend about 80% of my time shooting vertically.

Controls and Setup:

    A Nikon is a Nikon is a Nikon in many respects. Although the D4 has probably three times or more options and menu items compared to the D3200, the layout and overall themes are similar enough that I had no problem navigating and getting the camera set up for initial shooting. That being said, this is a far more capable tool and there are menus and settings that I have not even begun to explore yet. I am pretty sure that if I really dig deep enough and find the right combination of settings that I can network the D4 into NORAD and take over the world. (maybe that is what that built in ethernet port is for.....) I do admit I had to spend a lot of time on google researching various options and settings, although Nikon does have a basic setup guide that covers various generic shooting environments. There is also the option to import other people's settings by saving them onto one of your memory cards. I have not tested this ability yet, but I can see situations where it would be useful. I did update the firmware, which is also done via card, and that was fairly simple and straightforward. (note- other reviews have mentioned that if you have networking enabled, this will keep you from updating firmware until you turn it off) Looking forward to David Busch's guide when it finally comes out, I read his D3200 guide almost a year later and still learned new things about that camera so his D4 guide should be very handy. Probably the best thing about the controls- they are backlit so you can see them in the dark, even though they are intuitive enough that I expect not to need that feature much longer and already don't for commonly used ones. My least favorite so far- the custom settings and shooting banks. For a beginner at least it is a confusing setup, despite having read all I can online about them. In fact, it seems from my search online that there are many more people confused as well. My biggest problem with them, even as I start to figure them out, is that they don't stay static as you would want to save them for a starting point, when you switch out of one it saves in the state you were in when you left it. I guess that is useful in it's own way when repeatedly jumping between setups, but I wish you could control this behavior so I could always have a certain set point to start from. You can control almost everything else on the camera, do why not that? Small gripe overall for an excellently designed piece of gear with so much configurablility and control it will make your head spin.

Capabilities:

    First and foremost- low light, awesome autofocus and speed. These were the main reasons I was looking to upgrade in the first place. So how does Excalibur deliver on these fronts? Again- HOLY SMOKES! This think sees in the dark and is blazing fast, it's like you mixed a wizard, Chuck Norris, a cat and a Ninja all into one.

    Speed on many levels. From power on to taking the first focused shot is pretty much instantaneous. I've done some emergency pull outs from the bag and been shooting even before the lens cleared the bag. (anyone want some great pictures of the inside of my camera bags?) Speaking of which, due to the size of this camera, I had to also upgrade most of my camera bags to hold the larger body. Minor point, but you will be hearing bag reviews in the future as well. There is no perceptible shutter lag. I actually didn't understand what the term really meant until I got used to using this camera. Now the D3200 feel slow and my waterproof P&S (which is otherwise awesome and indestructible) feel positively glacial. The controls are so light and responsive that it seems like all you have to do is think of shooting and the shutter fires. Shooting feels almost psychic. So sensitive that even on single shot mode it’s easy to accidentally shoot two or three frames.

   Then there is burst speed. The D3200 shoots 4 frames per second and when shooting RAW the buffer only holds 7 shots. On the D4 shooting 14 bit Raw I can do 10 frames per second and the buffer didn't fill until 63 shots in. Basically, I shot an entire swing and trick of a trapeze flier at 10 FPS without filling the buffer. I had to capture the first bounce in the net because I wanted to see the buffer fill. It sounded like a damn machine gun. It will go a bit faster, 11 FPS, but only if you lock focus/exposure on the first frame. So let me break that down for you. 10 FPS and each one gets an updated exposure and focus calculation. FAST!

   Autofocus speed- Again amazing. If there is minimal contrast, focus is quick and solid, whether I am using the pro zooms or the primes. I haven’t put my consumer DX zoom on yet, but on all the other lenses the focus in noticeably faster, more accurate and takes a lot less light. If it is really dark and there is no contrast, it will still hunt, but I have found that in that case I can switch to live view and usually still manage to get good focus on anything that is lit enough for me to see its’ outline in the dark.

   In short, major wins in all three areas I was looking for with this upgrade.

High ISO Performance

    The D4 shoots native at ISO 100 – 12,800. It can drop down to ISO 50 or go up to HI4 (204,800). The D4 will produce useable images at any of its’ native ISOs. ISO 12,800 on the D4 has similar noise characteristics to ISO 3200 on the D3200. Unless it’s a very dark image overall I pretty much do no noise processing if I was shooting under ISO 6400, from 6400-12,800 any of the noise processing plugins I use with aperture are capable to completely negating what little noise there is. 

 ISO 12,800 with no noise reduction. 70-200mm f2.8, 1/50sec 

Same shot with noise reduction applied. 

    Just for fun one night I slapped on a 35mm F1.8 (dx) lens, cranked the ISO up to max at 204,800, walked into my son’s bedroom and took a shot of him in the crib in almost complete darkness. Had to use live view to focus, and boost it a bit in aperture, but after running it through some post processing noise reduction, it wasn’t an image I would post anywhere (except here for illustrative purposes) but the noise level would have made for an acceptable newspaper shot.

Pitch Dark bedroom, ISO 204,800. 50mmF1.8, 1/40sec No noise reduction. 

    Overall highly impressive. What is practically lets me do is open my zooms up to 2.8 and shoot performances at 1/500 second or sometimes faster, which lets me freeze anything I need to, and not have to worry about images getting ruined by noise.

ISO 12,800, 50mm f1.8, 1/1000sec - no noise reduction

    I have found that the Auto-ISO setting on the D4 is pretty damn useful. I set it to max out at 12,800 and then don’t worry about it unless I need to do something specific. The one consequence I found with this is that I was used to adjusting exposure by varying either aperture or shutter speed in manual, but with auto ISO on, unless I was maxed out, the D4 would adjust the ISO to maintain the same exposure when I changed the other settings, so I have had to learn to use the exposure compensation function. A minor adjustment and totally worth it for the convenience.  

Image Quality

     Talked about the high ISO performance earlier. Won't repeat how awesome that is. Also have no intention of getting into pixel peeping and all the technical mumbo-jumbo, the people over at DXO Mark do that way better than I can, if you want to go super deep geek, check them out. I'm going to give you my impressions as a user, not a tech nerd. Overall, the full frame sensor just gives better images all around vice the smaller sensor. Images seem more 3 dimensional somehow, they have more depth, and the depth of field is less for any given aperture, so it's easier to get good subject isolation. The color is phenomenal. I had the pleasure of shooting a bright daylight event with a friend and totally awesome photographer who is sort of my photo idol and inspiration. He shoots a high end Canon, and comparing the two image sets I could finally see the difference I had read about in the way Canon and Nikon capture things. I like the Nikon color and depth better, the Canon images seemed flat and a bit washed out. Maybe that is just how we processed them after, we're opposites on all fronts, he's Lightroom and I am Aperture, but anyway, the difference was obvious. One isn't better than the other, it's just a matter of preference and I guess I prefer the Nikon palette.

    One of the biggest criticism I saw of the D4 when looking around reviews was that it was only a 16mp camera. The D3200 is a 24mp camera, the D800 shoots at 36mp. Sure, I can crop in farther at greater resolution on the D3200 images. I am sure that is even more of a factor on the D800. Guess Nikon traded resolution for low light performance, and it seems like a good trade. Effectively it means I just have to plan my shots a little better and take time to compose the shot I want when I take it, instead of shooting way too wide and cropping down later. That being said, the focus and clarity is better enough on the D4 with a pro lens than on the D3200 with a consumer level lens, that I can actually crop tighter and still get clean results. (if I put the pro lenses on the D3200 that advantage goes away).

Lenses and Compatibility

    Since I am writing this primarily for people like me who are wondering about jumping up from DX to Full Frame for the first time, I should talk a little bit about lenses and glass compatibility. In short, you will be able to use any lens on the D4 that you were using on your DX body. The D4 will auto crop itself down when you put a DX lens on, but then you get less use out of that full frame sensor that you just paid a hell of a lot for. So what happens when you turn off the DX auto-crop feature and slap a DX lens onto Excalibur? I had to experiment with this out of necessity when my 24-70mm got knocked out of alignment (not by me) and had to go to Nikon for repair (not a speedy process). I ordered a 50mm 1.8 FX lens, but had a couple things I needed to shoot before that came in that were just too close for my 70-200, so I had to use the DX lenses I had. The 35mm F1.8 worked almost flawlessly in FX mode on the D4, I am happy to say. There was a slight vignetting around the corners, but since most of what I was shooting was in a theatre or club where the edges of my frames were dark anyway, this was not at all an issue. The other DX lens I had on hand was my 17-55mm F2.8. Zoomed in to 55mm there was little to no noticeable vignetting, increasing markedly as I zoomed out. At 17mm, there was a huge amount of vignetting, in almost a lantern pattern. (these pics were with NSFW subject matter, so no examples here, sorry) So- are your DX lenses going to be useable on the full frame camera, yes they are. But you will have to test each one out for yourself and see what focal lengths equate to a level of vignetting you can live with, or just use the crop mode until you can get some FX glass. Really, you should upgrade your glass before the body anyway, it’s a better investment of money, but if you need the performance of the FX for a specific purpose like I did, you can still use your old lenses while you upgrade. As a bonus, because it has a built in motor, you will be able to use older non-motorized lenses with the D4 so you can find some great lenses out there for relatively little money that will give you access to the full capability of the larger sensor. Google around and you’ll see lots of reviews. (disclaimer, all the Nikon FX bodies have the same in body motor, and some of the higher end DX bodies as well, this is not an exclusive feature of the D4)

Battery Life

    One thing I saw a lot of discussion about was the battery on the D4 as compared to the D3 series. It is not the same battery, nor does it share the same charger, which annoyed a lot of people, understandably, but there was also a concern that it was rated for way less shooting than the old. Apparently this was due to new battery design rules effective in Japan. I have not had the chance to shoot a D3, so I can't talk to the battery life on that, but I started a day long soccer tournament with a fully charged D4 battery. When it got to about halfway through the charge I decided not to change it out so I could really see how far I could push to get some data for this review. I was shooting continuous machine gun style, with an older lens (so the body screw had to do the focusing) and JPEG Fine resolution. I started the first game at 8am, shot ten 1 hour long games, averaging of 450 shots per game. Formatting memory cards after each game. The battery died in the second half of the 11th game. So, made it just shy of 5000 frames spread out over 10 hours on a single charge. Maybe the old batteries were better, but this one is plenty good enough for me. 

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

    I have not regretted upgrading to the D4. Even before I upgraded, I had no illusions that buying the best camera out there would magically make me a great photographer. I actually expected the opposite, that the higher level of camera would make my shortcomings as a shooter more obvious, instead of less. That didn’t happen. What I have found is that Excalibur makes it easier to capture the images I want, and it has taken me a giant step closer to where I want to be. It has also forced me to up my game and to learn new techniques and get better as a photographer. As I mentioned, the handy auto ISO feature has forced me to use exposure compensation instead of just playing with shutter and aperture settings. The AF is so good and the full frame depth of field is so razor thin at the wide open apertures of my pro lenses that I really have to pay attention to focus points and put the focus precisely where I want it, down to which eye I want in focus sometimes. The high burst speed has, contrary to expectation,  made me more conscious of waiting for the right moment and trying to get it in one shot instead of just machine gunning it. And I haven’t even begun to play with a lot of the modes and settings out there like interval shooting, 9 stop auto bracketing, and things like that. While the camera didn’t magically make me Ansel Adams, it has definitely opened doors to me and made me a better photographer already just trying to work to its’ potential. By way of analogy, a professional Tour de France cyclist, when put on a beach cruiser, would definitely be able to crush a regular joe on another beach cruiser, and could probably beat a couch potato on a high end race bike. But to compete at the top level against other pros on race bikes, that cyclist needs to be on a good race bike or they will get left in the dust no matter how hard they train. Can a great photographer take an amazing picture with a point and shoot? Of course. Can a great photographer use the same point and shoot in a darkened theatre, turn off the flash and take a picture of a rapidly moving dancer at a high enough shutter speed to freeze her motion at the precise peak of a leap across the stage? Probably not. Would I have been happy with the D600? Maybe for a while. The low light performance and image quality would have been a step up still, but I think I would have outgrown it. What about the D800? I may eventually grab one as a second body, but I think the resolution was much higher than I needed and the high resolution seems to come at the expense of speed, so I think I still would have found it limiting in the shooting environments I am focusing on. So yeah, I went from one end of the camera body spectrum to the other, no intervening steps. But I have no regrets at all. Is it right for you? I can’t say. If you shoot action in the dark, then heck yes. If you are shooting landscapes, the D800 would probably be a better choice for you. But for me, the D4 was the right call. It is awesome!

  The final note- I shot some pics at an overnight Search and Rescue last weekend, and when I posted them someone asked me if the night shots were HDR, and when I told him no, the follow up was, "holy crap, what are you shooting with?" That pretty much says it all about what Excalibur can do. 

ISO 12,800, 50mm F1.8, 1/50sec, noise reduction applied in post