The Ultimate Adventure Camera?
Three years ago, my roommate bought a D800E. I’ve always shot Canon, but he let me borrow his Nikon for a couple of shoots. It was impressive to say the least. I vowed that when it was time for me to upgrade from my 5D Mk II, if Canon hadn’t released a comparable body, that I would give the D800 a shot.
Fast forward to this past April. While riding a $US450 motorcycle through Vietnam, I lost my backpack with everything in it — including my trusty, dusty Canon 5D Mk II, and the only piece of glass that mattered. I started doing research on the current SLR market. Nothing out there seemed that impressive or able to meet the intensive demands of adventure photography — including the (at the time) recently-announced 5DS. That is, until I ran across the recently released 36 with battery such as Nikon Coolpix D5100 Battery, Nikon Coolpix D3100 Battery, Nikon Coolpix D3200 Battery, Nikon EN-EL18 Battery, Nikon EN-EL18A Battery, Nikon D4 Battery, Nikon EN-EL15 Battery, Nikon 1 V1 Battery, Nikon D7100 Battery, Nikon D800 Battery, Nikon 1 V2 Battery, Nikon EN-EL21 Battery megapixel Nikon D810 ($3699 Body Only.) It was time to give it a shot.
I shot this with my crappy phone from a plane window over Bellingham, Washington.
Most modern mobile phones are capable of producing stunning imagery — just take a look at the “Shot on iPhone 6″ billboards that are everywhere. This isn’t an argument against shooting photos with a mobile phone. There are also a ton of in-depth reviews scrutinizing every possible pixel of the most powerful cameras out there; they already show that the D810 produces the highest Image Quality (IQ) of any DSLR, ever. This isn’t one of those reviews.
Is the Nikon D810 the ultimate camera for adventure photography? Pictured here with the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8E GD.
Instead, this review examines how the D810 performs in the field of adventure photography. What is adventure photography? It’s simply the act of photographing adventures, typically in the outdoors. It’s a niche defined by stunning landscapes, dynamic personalities, and challenging, ever-changing shooting conditions. That last part is key.
Typical shooting conditions for alpine adventure photography.
Often adventure photographers must work in the most volatile environments — ranging from ice sheets on Antarctica to blizzards in the Himalayas to swamps under the canopies of the Amazon. As such, an adventure photographer’s equipment must be durable and easy to use, while still possessing incredible image quality and dynamic range. Those are the categories that will be the subject of focus for this review. But first, a little about the camera.
The D810 is the successor to Nikon’s popular D800E. The “E” designator is an important factor here because it marks a key differentiation from the non-E model; that is the E model featured a secondary optical low-pass filter to cancel out the camera’s anti-aliasing filter (“aliasing” when related to digital photography refers to the presence of moire when photographing repeating patterns.) The result? The D800E produced slightly sharper images than the D800. And sharpness is incredibly important to photographers dealing with the medium-format resolution images that the camera creates. For the D810, Nikon got rid of the anti-aliasing filter all together, resulting in unprecedented detail and sharpness.
So how does the D810 perform in the realm of adventure photography? Let’s find out.