I got my D800 today, and I feel a bit like Roy Scheider in Jaws after he saw the size of the shark.  The files that come out of this camera are huge and remarkably good.  The 36 megapixels are also pushing the envelope of all of the rest of my equipment.

Lenses
The camera is so sharp that it is showing focus falloff where my D700 did not. Even great modern lenses like the 14-24 are showing signs of image imperfections that I have never seen before.  I suppose I’ll need to test all of my lenses and see which ones are up to using on this camera.  I also expect that I’ll need to test them at all apertures.

There’s a potential limits of diffraction problem with this kind of pixel density.

Lonaconing Silk Mill, Lonaconing, MD 60mm Micro Nikkor @ f/8
Click here for the Zoomify version 

Cards
I’m getting 175 images on an 8 GB CF card. That’s going to go quickly. I have a bunch of much larger SD cards (32 GB), but they are slower.  Again, it looks like I’ll be doing some testing here.  I want first to see if any of the cards will produce a slowdown in shooting speed as they struggle to keep up with the data writing. After that, I’ll want to see what download times are for the various cards.  This will certainly be important in the field.

Hard Drives
I’ll be filling these up much faster with 40-50 MB raw files (14 bit, lossless compressed). This will certainly mean new portable drives for my upcoming trip to China, as well as for any extended location shoot.  And the archive drives will also be filling up faster, so there’s another purchase there as well.

Computer
These files are big, and process slowly. I have a feeling I’m going to need as much speed as I can get. New iMac?  New Macbook Pro?  Not sure.

Web publishing technology
There’s also a need to be able to view these images over the web. Photoshop has come with something called Zoomify – linked here – that can help with this.  But there’s some new technology called Piqsure that does this with HTML5 in some pretty cool ways.  More on that soon.

More

For most of the time I was in Mozambique, I was working on a project to teach African photographers how to enter the world marketplace. My typical day looked a lot like this:After a few days locked in a conference room, however, this group of photogaphers had to get out and shoot something. We headed out to a local music festival, celebrating National Heroes Day.  This elderly gentleman was being escorted down the street. He was trying to tell me something, but unfortunately my Portuguese is pretty thin.

Click for larger image

Here it is on a map.

More

Click for much larger image

This panorama was shot on the N1 outside Richmond, South Africa in the heart of the Karoo. I used a 14 mm lens on a D700, which really accentuated the beauty of the storm clouds moving in. I’ve prepared this file using the export tools in Lightroom, the panorama stitching in Photoshop CS5, and the Zoomify export command in CS5.

Clicking on the link will take you to a new page that has the Zoomify embedded.

The clouds in this image are amazing when you zoom in.

More

Click for larger image.

Here’s one of my favorite images from my project in South Africa. Hope in South Africa set up a brai (that’s a barbecue for you Americans)  at the community center.  Because of recent rains, many of the kids did not come down from the squatter camps.  So they loaded up the food into some cars and took it up to the camp. As you can see, it was a big hit.

And, no, the dog did not get that sausage he was eyeing, but it was close.

See it in Google maps.

View Larger Map

More