There is definitely something exhilarating about watching a 400lb sow brown bear come charging straight at you through the water. Of course, that feeling would be a little different if it wasn’t for the fact that you were confident she was intent on the salmon fighting their way up through the shallow delta at low tide. I think the feeling otherwise would be more like the realization you need new underwear.
With Nikon’s release of their new D5, I uncharacteristically jumped on board pretty quick. Normally I wait things out a while. Give it a year for bugs to be worked out and ghosts to be exercised from the machine. But the litany of upgrades that the D5 brought over my D4 was just too much for me to pass up. So far I have loved this camera. But to be honest, I really haven’t put it use in high ISO situations. That is, until I landed on the beach along Cook Inlet Alaska in a little Cessna.
This photograph was shot before sunrise at ISO 5000 in order to bring my shutter up to 1/1000. High shutter speeds are necessary for this sort of action and when there is so little light like this, there is only one way to achieve a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second.
Overall I am quite pleased with the noise of this camera at such high ISO. I realize that Nikon marketed this thing as having insanely high ISO capabilities. But really though, who the hell is going to shoot at a million ISO? What I wanted to see was solid usable results from the 4000 – 10,000 range. And so far, this camera has delivered!