Here's one for you - taken facing West on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Waynesville, North Carolina on 10/17/2005 - 9 shot pano with a D70 and 18-70 Kit lens - this was long before Photoshop and digital cameras had pano stitching capability built-in. This was actually taken in the dark about an hour before the official sunrise time - the color was brought out in Camera Raw. We got up at 4:30 AM to get here for this shot. We used to go to the U.S. Naval Observatory site for sun/moon rise & set data, now we have Android tablets/phablets and a great app called Sundroid to give us that info and a whole lot more.

I have a Gossen Luna Pro that I have had for well over 30 years, it still works like new, and I use it regularly. Gossen and Sekonic have been among the best there is for a very long time.

Not if you already have a bunch of great old film era Nikkors, which I fortunately do - the good ones are just that much better on the D800 than they were on my D700 (no comparison really) Out of 8 Manual Nikkors, and 3 modern "pro" auto lenses, every single one of them is seriously better with the D800 - It really is all about resolution when you are talking about 36Mpxls. The only FF lens that I will not be using on the D800 is a 200-500 Tamron - it was usable on the D700, but the D800 makes its deficiencies abundantly clear.

I have been using Red River Luster (semi-gloss) papers lately and like them very much. I am currently printing on an Epson 3880 (which is a really great printer by the way). I used to be constantly trading off between matte and glossy papers, which require swapping matte and photo black inks with the Epsons. Each changeover results in ink $$ going to waste to purge the lines of the previous black. I found that the Luster papers work great for everything I print and no more ink waste. As several others have suggested, Red River's sample packs are inexpensive and a great way to find out what you prefer in the way of papers.

I had 3 different crop sensor Nikon DSLRs and a full-frame D700 before getting my D800 for Christmas from my very understanding wife. I have also had a string of so-called "bridge" cameras and high-end compact changeable lens "system" cameras, hoping that someday I will have a small, light system that will give me the quality of my big, heavy DSLRs. Well, I finally found that after I got a Fuji X-pro1 - because of its wonderful 16megapixel sensor and superb lenses, it actually outperforms my D700 and its 12mpxls.

However, I still was not getting what I really have wanted ever since converting to digital - that is medium format quality in big prints. I like sharp, sharp, sharp highly detailed landscapes and black and white prints at 16x24 at least, but could not justify the 5 figure expense of medium format digital backs and lenses to get the kind of resolution and detail I wanted.

Then the D800 came, and Oh, my gosh! That thing just blows away every camera I have ever had in film or digital 35mm and smaller. It truly is the equal of my old film medium format cameras. But it isn't just because it is "full-frame" - the D700 is full-frame, too. It is because that D800 sensor has 35 million high-quality pixels, and believe me when I say that the difference in print quality/fine detail resolution is night and day when compared to every digital I have had before! AND you can clearly see the difference in small (8x10) prints as well.

I was ready to go all-out on lenses for the X-Pro1 before I got the D800, but now have completely changed course.

So, to answer your question, In light of my experience, I would say that unless you go for a high resolution (24mpxl or more) full-frame DSLR and the expensive lenses it will require to get the image quality they are capable of, you might as well stay with a good crop sensor DSLR or compact system camera like Fuji, Sony, Panasonic, and Olympus are making now. I will be keeping one of them myself for the times that I am unwilling or unable to pack the D800 and its big heavy lenses around.

The Full-Frames have a bigger, brighter viewfinder - smaller formats have more toward what some call a "tunnel" view. I have poor vision and could never focus with my 3 different crop sensor Nikons, and their autofocus was not reliable enough for what I do. That is why I jumped at the D700 when it came out - the finder was a revelation - I could focus at last!

I started with Aperture when it was first introduced and liked it, but kept trying Lightroom as it evolved, and switched over at V.2. Haven't used Aperture since. I read a blog post from an Apple/Aperture guru awhile back wherein he was commenting/complaining that Apple had seemingly given up on keeping Aperture competitive and that Adobe had clearly pulled ahead. His take was that Apple was really concentrating its development resources on the Consumer stuff (iPhones, iPads, etc.) and devoting less attention to the serious photographers/artists that used to be Apple's core constituency. That led, of course, to a spirited debate. I will post a link to that thread if I can find it again.

Different strokes for different folks - I love my heavy duty Manfrotto 475B with 329RC4 3-way pan/tilt head - It takes my big heavy cameras and long lenses without working up a sweat. For light gear, backpacking or motorcycle trips, my $120 Manfrotto 394-H with integral 3-way head fills the bill. And I have had absolutely no problem with Manfrotto quick-release plates with any of my cameras over many years.

Arca Swiss makes really nice stuff, if you have lots of money and don't mind spending it.

And I hate ball heads! I have a couple of good ones that have been gathering dust for years. But that's just me - YMMV

Hi, Otter - That looks like a pretty nice little camera - I carried a Pentax K1000 around on my motorcycle for years in the 80's and it was like a Honda or Toyota, you just couldn't break it (I still have it, and it still works!) Anyway, I have a few suggestions for the situation you described and for photography in general:

1. Unless you are outdoors shooting in nice weather and under blue skies, don't rely on the camera's auto white balance if you are shooting something important - the best single thing you can do is to shoot in RAW + Fine Jpg if your camera allows that. That way, you will have a high-quality jpg to use. If conditions are right and the OOC (out-of-camera) jpg is fine, you can forget the Raw image that you took, as in toss it if you are short of space on your hard drive. However, if the white balance is off, the RAW image will save the picture, since you can set the White Balance of the image after-the-fact in your RAW image processing software. (See below for more about the WB thing).

2. Don't trust or depend on the camera's tricky focus features such as face detection, AFC (continuous), matrix, or whatever unless you are doing something like shooting sports (or birds/kids?) where you want to track a subject that is running or flying around and you and want the camera to (try to) keep the subject in focus without trying to manually keep a fixed focus point precisely on the subject. For most other situations, the most reliable focus mode is the single focus point, which is by default the focus sensor in the center of the screen. If you set the camera to use only a single focus point, then you point that at the subject, press the shutter release 1/2 way, wait for the "focus lock" signal, then finish pressing the shutter button down. If you have your shutter release set to "focus priority", then you can just mash the shutter release all the way down and wait for the click. The camera will fire as soon as it has established focus.

Note: If your subject is stationary and your camera is on a tripod, say, and you want to use the "rule of thirds" for positioning the subject in the frame, most DSLRs will allow you to move the single focus point around the frame so you can place it over the subject wherever it or they may be. You can, of course, do the same thing when hand-holding the camera, but I find it quicker and easier to just use the "focus and recompose" process where you put the central focus point on the part of the subject you want to be in focus, press the shutter 1/2 way, wait for the focus beep, then keeping the shutter at 1/2 press to maintain focus, move the camera to recompose if needed. This is very fast and easy with just a little practice.

Now, for more on the subject of White Balance. If you really want to be in control of white balance, you need to know how to do a Custom White Balance - your camera should have that capability. That means that once you have set the camera to do a Custom White Balance you will put either a piece of white paper or a neutral gray card in the predominant light source illuminating the subject and take a close-up picture of it. That will set the camera's white balance to precisely match the light you are shooting in. I use a neutral gray card (often referred to as an "18% gray card") because I have found through experience that it will be more accurate than a white piece of paper (there are many shades of "white" when it comes to paper - 18% gray is always 18% gray). The gray card has another important use - it will help you set an accurate exposure in tricky lighting conditions, as it is the standard that light meters are calibrated to for setting autoexposure values, whether hand-held or built-into the camera. If you are interested in learning more about this, let me know and I will give you the nuts and bolts of it. Modern camera autoexposure functionality is usually pretty good, but often is lacking in special circumstances. It is a good thing to know how to set up manual exposure when you need to.

Oh, one other comment about white balance - in my work I often run into mixed lighting, which is really undesirable if shooting architecture or for advertising. Now that CFLs (compact fluorescent lighting) are all the rage, I am constantly running into them. The cheap ones people buy at Walmart or the grocery store typically produce an icky greenish cast to the scene that is very difficult to correct for. For that reason, I carry a box full of daylight balance CFLs and replace all of the bulbs in the lamps in the location I am shooting. That way, I can use daylight from the windows along with flash if needed and have lamps turned on around a room for "mood" and not have any issue with conflicting types of light.

I hope this helps - let me know if I have only confused you or if I can be of additional assistance.

Cheers,
Harry

What camera and lens? What mode (PASM) were you shooting in? Did you (can you) shoot in RAW+jpg so you can easily correct poor color balance? What White Balance mode(s) did you use? What focus modes, how many focus points when shooting auto? What shutter speeds, focal lengths, apertures? Samples with Exif data + more info would be helpful.

A mix of fluorescent and Xmas lights is a potential white balance nightmare for any camera.

Abby, congrats on your new D800. I got mine on Christmas eve, and since we are in a miserable winter weather period right now, have spent most of the last week doing camera/lens tests on subjects in and around the house and doing a lot of shooting out an open unscreened porch window of outdoor subjects in our rural neighborhood. I then spent a good part of the last two days printing images of the same highly detailed complex subjects from various cameras and lenses for comparison.

Now, before going off on my image quality/IQ tangent, regarding your focus question: I have always used only a SINGLE focus point as I have found that is the only way to have complete control and confidence in what the camera is focusing on. AND the D800 is the FIRST DSLR that I have had with which I would consider using autofocus on a regular basis at all (except for my X-Pro1, which is deadly accurate, but of course is not a DSLR). If I were a sports shooter, I might try some of the trick focus modes, but I'm not, so I can't speak to that aspect of autofocus, except to say that when I tried them with other cameras, the camera often focused somewhere other than where I wanted them to!

I apologize in advance for the length of the rest of this, but I just had to share my D800 experiences with some people that at least offer some hope of understanding my extreme enthusiasm!
I hope this isn't interpreted as thread hi-jacking, I am trying to address Abby's comments re comparing D800 image quality/resolution with her D90, and am one of those annoying people that never uses a few a few succinct sentences when a bunch of paragraphs will do!

Anyway, as for image quality/resolution differences between the D800 and every other digital camera I have ever had:

The most important thing I learned with all of the testing is that pixel peeping (even on a high resolution graphics monitor) to compare cameras and lenses is largely a waste of time. I sorta knew this before, but my experiments with the D800 etc has really brought this home to me in a big way.

You have to PRINT your images (and the bigger the better) to see the vast superiority of 36 high quality megapixels over lesser cameras. You simply cannot compare looking at a monitor with a resolution of 72-100 pixels per inch with a high quality print with multiple times that in dpi. And, believe it or not, you can clearly see the difference even in smaller prints such as 5x7.

Until the D800 came along, my highest quality camera/lens combo was a 16mpxl Fuji X-Pro1 with a 35/1.4 (50mm FF equiv.) That setup out-resolves anything I have outside the D800. The Fuji images are superior to those from any previous digital camera (or 35mm film camera) that I have ever owned, and that includes my 16mpxl Lumix GH2 and to my 12mpxl D700. I believe that superiority is primarily due to the superb lens and the fact that the Fuji sensor, besides being a very good one to start, also has a weak or non-existant AA filter. No amount of PP sharpening and other fiddling can get the D700 or GH2 to look as good as the Fuji.

Now the interesting thing is that with a couple of rounds of sharpening, I can make the Fuji images look as good on screen at 100% as the D800 images with my second-tier FF Nikkor lenses. However, that apparent equivalence disappears when comparing actual prints of those same images. And, of course, with the better (gold ring) Nikkor lenses, the D800 images look better than the Fuji's even on the monitor, let alone the prints.

Another interesting aspect of all this testing is that while a lot of sharpening is required to get the best prints from my other cameras (not so much with the X-pro1), sharpening makes no difference that I can see in the prints from the D800. This is the first digital camera I have had that I could say this about. By the way, my in-camera sharpening is set at #3 of ten sharpening steps available (that is the second of 9 steps above the zero sharpening end of the range.)

After spending a great deal of time reading reviews on the web, I purchased the 28-300/f3.5-5.6 and 24-120/f4 lenses with the D800 so as to make an objective decision about which would be best for me as a good walk-around/recreational photo lens.

Well, it was easy, since my whole reason for getting a D800 is to be able to make the sharpest, highest resolution big prints possible without spending a pile of money on a Leica S3 or medium format back and lenses. Looking at the results from my samples of the 2 lenses, the 24-120 is clearly the winner at every common focal length and f stop. They are still close enough in overall performance that I believe that it is quite possible, given production variations, to get a 28-300 that will outperform a 20-120.

Therefore, I will be sending the 28-300 back, since I rarely use focal lengths beyond 100mm, and have a very good 50-300 Nikkor that I can turn to for those rare occasions when I want to shoot long.

Anyway, (on the D800) the 28-300 still produces images as good as all but one of my old Nikkor zooms and a little better than a couple of them. Note that with my D700, I could never see any meaningful difference between any of my old and new Nikkors (except for the truly horrible 24-120 variable aperture "kit" lens that came with it) since they are ALL good quality and it takes a camera like the D800 to clearly separate the (slightly) better from the (slightly) inferior.

The bottom line for me is that IMHOP, the D800 is an incredible camera worthy of all the praise, is by far the best digital camera I have ever had or hoped to have, and I can't wait to get out and do some serious photography with it (darn winter!) I got the thing with every intention of sending it back, cause I just couldn't see what the big deal was by pixel-peeping at images downloaded from the internet. But I just had to find out one way or the other, cause I have never been happy with the limitations of the cameras that I could afford up to now. I used to shoot medium format (mostly slides and B/W film) for my serious work before digital and I just didn't think I would ever be able to afford that kind of performance in the digital world. Well, the D800 has given me what I thought was impossible - thank you Nikon!

I too purchased the 800 rather than the 800e for the reasons stated by Zero above. I seldom use apertures below f8, so I didn't see any real advantage to the 800e that was worth another $300. I am totally blown away by the image quality and the incredibly fast and accurate autofocus under any condition I have tried short of total darkness, not to mention the superb user interface and all the extra bells and whistles. I have spent most of my waking hours for the last 4 days testing and comparing lenses, cameras, and analyzing close to a thousand images to find out first, do I want to keep this camera (is it really worth the major investment it represents?), then can I use my large collection of 20-30 year old lenses with it - will I be able to avoid spending a fortune on pro lenses to get what I am looking for from the camera?

Well, the answer is YES, YES, & YES! My old lenses were good ones, and they are GREAT lenses on the D800 - the only new lens I have purchased specifically for the D800 is the 24-120/f4. The images I am getting with this camera are awesome whether hand-held, shot from a tripod, in poor light, whatever - it doesn't matter. It has convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that Megapixels do matter after all, especially when those pixels are of superb quality. I can finally get the fine detail I want in my landscapes without doing multi-shot panos or spending a fortune on medium format digital. I can't wait to get my next project under way!

That comment by the "very respected photographer" is a perfect example of something coming from a giant ego - he is the "ME" of his comment!

Why I shoot Raw along with full-size Fine jpgs:

First, most of the time I shoot like I did with film cameras, meaning that I pre-visualise my shot, then set the camera up in a way that will get me there. Most of the time, the JPG out of the camera is fine, and about the only post-processing I do is final sharpening and/or resizing for print or the web. So I developed an attitude about RAW pretty early on, as in "who needs it?" Not only that, I rarely reviewed the shots on the LCD panel once I had set the camera up for a series.

I finally got my comeuppance while on a vacation with friends in a lovely coastal region south of San Francisco. We got up early one morning to go for a hike on a cliffside trail with some terrific photo ops along the way. I shot about 100 or so images along that trail. We were on a tight schedule that day, so after returning from the hike, we packed up and headed for the airport. I didn't review the images from that hike until we were back home (2700 miles away). I'll bet some of you can see what is coming. I had been shooting indoor shots at nightspots in the city under incandescent and fluorescent lighting the night before the hike. I had last set the white balance to Incandescent and the camera was still set to incandescent when I took the trail pictures, thus the jpgs were all hopelessly blue due to the suppression of Red done by the in-camera jpg processing engine. If I had shot in Raw, that would have been nothing more than a trivial inconvenience, since you can convert the white balance to anything you like in the Raw processor. However, with only jpgs to work with, all of my images from that hike were ruined - you can't recreate colors in post that simply weren't there in the original images. That disaster happened about 10 years ago.

Since then, I have religiously shot in Raw + Fine Jpg, and have had many instances of rescuing otherwise hopeless images in the Raw processor for reasons other than simply correcting for improperly set White Balance.

Raw images contain a LOT more data which provides a great deal of leeway for correcting various flaws without seriously affecting image quality or for creatively changing the image for artistic/personal reasons. Something to keep in mind: Modern high-end cameras generally save Raw with 12 or 14 bits of data per color channel - that is 16x or 64x the 256 bits per channel you get with Jpg.

Here is a great article (fairly brief) that provides a good explanation of what is going on in Raw image files during disaster recovery, especially in the case of underexposure: http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/nikon-d300-d3-14-bit-versus-12-bit.html

A real-world example: I once saved an entire wedding shoot that was taken by a lady who was a good photographer (artistic with a great eye) but didn't know how to use anything but point and shoot mode. She made terrific pictures in good light, but the wedding shots were a disaster (gross underexposure). Fortunately, I had nagged her into always shooting Raw, which she had done, so I was able to rescue her wedding shots via Raw processing - that would have been impossible if she had shot only jpgs.

To conclude, this is how I use Raw images: When I transfer images to the computer, I will initially transfer only the jpgs. I then quickly go through them with my image preview/sorter program, looking for problem images that I might want to keep, but that will require some serious processing. I will then transfer the Raw versions of those problem images for further work in the Raw processor. If the shoot was for pay, I will keep all of the images, jpgs and Raw, in a permanent file. If the images are personal, I will toss the remaining Raws unless I can see potential for doing something artsy with them. In other words, I don't work with Raw images unless the jpgs just won't do the job, although I might save some or all of them depending on the circumstances.

For me, it is almost always easier (and faster) to "focus and recompose" than it is to move the focus point around the screen. The only time I move the focus point is when I am shooting from a tripod, where it is inconvenient and time consuming to move the camera around to focus. Unfortunately, even on a tripod, I often find that there will not be a focus sensor that covers what I am trying to zero in on, so I end up moving the camera anyway. And I probably do handheld vs. tripod about 50/50.