As many of you already know I recently made the change from Canon to Nikon. I gave my analogies on the Nikon system and my reason for changing on an earlier post a few months ago.
I first bought the D5 as I knew it was going to be the main body I wanted to shoot with as I enjoy flight and action photography and the speed and AF were what I was looking for. Also the ISO is very good with this body. I shot with it for a few months and really enjoyed the great autofocus of the new Nikon system and I got many beautiful frames that I wasn't able to get with my old system.
A few of my friends kept telling me to get the D850 because they told me that the 45mpxls was a huge difference and they loved theirs. I didn't have a backup camera anyway so I decided to pick up the D850.
The first day I took it out was to my peregrine falcon spot. It was a bit overcast and when I got back home and looked at my files I was not overly excited about them. The images looked fairly noisy and the action captured wasn't very crisp.
I was pretty bummed out and felt as if I had wasted my money on this body. Maybe it had an application but it didn't look like it was going to be good choice for me. I threw it in the closet and it sat there for months.
Just recently when we found our new burrowing owl location I decided to try it out again on a nice sunny morning to see how good it did in Fair-weather. When I got back from the shoot I was actually pretty blown away of how good the images looked and how much detail there was. Much better than my D5 and my Canon bodies.
So it does have a good application for me. In good sunny conditions it performs very well, and as shown in this image, the Crop-ability is amazing. I have never been able to crop images like this before and I am a big-time pixel peeper.
When we were shooting this male kestrel I decided to change from the D5 to the D850 do a good comparison. To be honest there was no comparison. I figured this was about the perfect range for the D850 and 840mm lens combination. It's a pretty common distance for bird photography as we all would all like to be very close but something like this distance is more realistic for most raptors and flighty birds. We estimated the distance to be about 30 meters or 90 feet. Doing the math I came up with an 83% crop on this image from the original!! A bit tighter than I would normally crop but I wanted to push it to show the ability of the camera.
That is pretty amazing considering how good the fine feather detail is and this downsized image doesn't do the Image justice as the master TIFF file is awesome and you would think that I was much closer to the subject. Looks like I have a new camera to play with:bg3: That's the power of pixels :)
D850---840mm---f6.3---ss1/2500th---ISO640---Hand held from truck@7:40am---83% crop!!
Thanks as always for looking and for your input. I appreciate it.
David


