The next step, assuming you can get closer to your subjects, is something like a 50mm f/1.4. Two extra stops are a non-trivial improvement, and the lens is cheap.



Needless to say, it's a world of difference, or at least that's what I thought when I upgraded from a D70 to a D700. I'll caution you that the upgrade to FX implies an upgrade in carry weight. And I don't have to caution you that kids have a habit of forcing you to haul around things besides cameras. This sort of logic led me to my Fuji X-Pro 1 and might similarly lead you to one of the various "mirrorless" cameras out there.


While all these cameras hypothetically support shooting at these immensely high ISO values, in practice, you'd never want to go so high unless you were only trying to get something barely usable when you shrink the picture down mercilessly.

Also, here's a trick to keep in mind. When you shoot raw, there's no such thing as the camera restricting the ISO. Instead, the sensor gets what it gets. If you shoot at the base ISO, then the high bit may well be one or zero. If you shoot one stop faster, then (assuming you're not blowing highlights) the high bit will always be zero. Basically, you're left-shifting the results by one bit. You want to shoot four stops faster? Left shift by four. The more you shift, the more you're digging into the low-order bits, which give you progressively less useful information.

Lastly, since I know somebody will bring it up, left-shifting the bits is much dumber than any actual raw conversion program. Instead, you want to see if there's actual signal up there and play HDR games of some sort to preserve that highlight detail that you'd otherwise be pushing to pure white. That's more or less what all the major commercial RAW converters do.


Nutshell summary: the current crop of fancy pants D-SLRs are all very good. This year, the Nikons are marginally better than the Canons, but not enough that you shouldn't get a Canon if you otherwise prefer them, perhaps because you prefer their lenses or something. In four more years, Canon may well have leapfrogged Nikon, but good glass will always be good glass.

With specific regard to the exceptionally high resolution of the D800, it's effectively giving you a choice. You want the bit-depth quality of a lower-resolution sensor? Then just downsample your image. Done. You prefer incredible high resolution, albeit with more noise in the dark bits, then you've got that choice as well -- a choice you don't get with any other camera. The only real price you pay for this flexibility is that the raw files are big and presumably are that much slower to process. Also, you may feel an unbearable need to purchase the most expenses lenses that money can buy, never mind a fancy tripod, expensive strobes, and so forth, so you can actually get the most out of that lovely sensor.